In University Place, many families cycle through urgent care, primary care, follow-up appointments, and referrals. That routine—while common—can create a dangerous gap when symptoms don’t fit neatly into the first visit.
When a diagnosis is delayed, the harm may not appear all at once. Instead, the patient may experience:
- worsening symptoms between appointments
- “watch and wait” plans that buy time for the disease to progress
- follow-up steps that don’t happen quickly enough (or at all)
- reliance on test summaries that weren’t properly acted on
When automated systems are part of the workflow—such as software that flags imaging findings or helps prioritize risk—an error can become harder to spot. The issue may not be obvious to a patient or even to the treating team at the moment it occurs.
Our job is to examine the timeline and identify the decision points where the standard of care may have fallen short.


