In Seattle, diagnostic error cases commonly develop around timing and handoffs—especially when patients are seen in urgent-care or emergency settings, then routed to imaging, labs, or follow-up appointments.
When an AI-enabled tool is part of the process—such as risk scoring, clinical decision support, triage algorithms, or imaging/lab interpretation workflows—the human team still has to:
- review the results in context
- resolve conflicts with objective findings
- document the reasoning for diagnosis and next steps
- act promptly on abnormal results
In practice, delays may look like this:
- a symptom pattern that wasn’t escalated quickly enough
- abnormal imaging or lab findings not clearly addressed in the record
- incomplete or inconsistent intake documentation during busy intake periods
- follow-up instructions that didn’t match the severity indicated by test results


