Personal Injury Law

Diagnosing Patients With Traumatic Brain Injuries in Emergency Rooms

By Bruce Stern

Neuroattorneys and clinicians have long recognized that emergency room physicians often fail to diagnose a patient who sustained a mild traumatic brain injury.  In the March 2008 issue of the Archives of Physical Medicine Rehabilitation, doctors from the Departments of Rehabilitation Medicine, Neurosurgery and Psychiatry at the University of Washington conducted a study to determine how often emergency department patients meeting the CVC mild traumatic brain injury criteria were diagnosed with a mild TBI by an emergency room physician.

The study revealed that 56% of mild TBI cases identified by study personnel did not have a documented mild TBI-related diagnosis in the emergency room record.  The authors concluded from the study that the diagnosis of mild TBI was frequently absent from emergency room medical records despite patients reporting findings consistent with a mild TBI diagnosis when interviewed by study personnel.  The authors found that asking a few targeted questions of emergency room patients with likely mechanisms of injury that could result in mild TBI could begin to improve diagnosis and in turn begin to improve patient management and the accuracy of the estimates of mild TBI incidents.

For the neuroattorney, this article serves as another arrow to pierce the myths testified to by defense experts who routinely testify, under oath, that a patient did not sustain a mild traumatic brain injury because there was no diagnosis of such in the emergency room records.  This article will prove to be a valuable weapon when cross-examining these “so-called experts.”

Full post as published by Traumatic Brain Injury Law Blog on July 11, 2008 (boomark / email).