Misdiagnosis: Disclosing a Colleague's Error

In the United States, medical errors cause approximately 44,000 to 98,000 unnecessary deaths each year and as many as 1,000,000 excess injuries.1 Disclosure of these errors is a highly charged ethical and legal issue. While physicians correctly perceive an ethical duty to disclose an error to a patient,2,3 deterrent factors like lawsuits and other punitive actions cause a “disclosure gap.” Although most patients want their physicians to disclose harmful medical errors, this happens less than half of the time.4 The bounds of appropriate behavior are even less clear for physicians who discover medical errors made by their colleagues.5 The following vignette and discussion will address the ethical and legal issues faced by physicians who identify a medical error made by a professional colleague, and discuss the factors they must consider in determining when to disclose the error and to whom.