In the Charleston metro area, patients often move through a sequence of care: urgent care or emergency triage, imaging or lab testing, follow-up instructions, and sometimes repeat visits when symptoms don’t improve. Misdiagnosis and delayed diagnosis claims commonly trace back to breakpoints in that chain—especially when information is fragmented across providers.
Common South Charleston–area scenarios we review include:
- Abnormal lab or imaging results that weren’t acted on promptly, or weren’t routed correctly to the right clinician.
- Follow-up gaps after an ER or outpatient visit—when the plan depends on a patient returning, but symptoms escalate first.
- Handoffs between shifts where a symptom trend is missed because documentation or escalation steps weren’t complete.
- Automated “flagging” or risk scoring treated as decisive when it should have been verified against objective findings.
The takeaway: a wrong or late diagnosis is rarely “one mistake.” It’s often a combination of workflow decisions, communication problems, and clinical oversight.


