Confidential Settlement: Animating How Misdiagnosed Infection Caused Septic Shock

In this case, a man in his mid-fifties died of septic shock hours after a walk-in clinic sent him home without diagnosing a potentially deadly infection. Had care providers drawn the patient’s blood and tested it, they would have clearly seen that an infection was present, and antibiotics could have stopped the infection in its tracks.

The first animation establishes the mechanism of injury in how a misdiagnosed infection can progress into sepsis and cause death. The animation opens with the circulatory system delivering oxygenated blood throughout the body. As the concept of infection is introduced, a magnified screen captures the Group G Streptococcus bacteria involved in this case. The bacterial infection circulates throughout the bloodstream and seeds into joints and tissue to cause sepsis, as shown when the camera zooms into the patient’s knee joint. In this case, the septic joint continued to permeate bacteria throughout the bloodstream, which harmed vital organs, caused difficulty in breathing, and dropped blood pressure - until the patient eventually died from septic shock.

Once we established how the infection resulted in sepsis and death, we needed to show how easily this entire sequence of events could have been prevented had care providers tested the patient’s blood and treated the infection in a timely manner.

One of the indicators of infection is an increased number of immature white blood cells - called band cells - in the blood. The animation anchors the audience’s understanding of this fact by zooming in on individual band cells within a hypothetical test tube. The high percentage of bandemia, in this case, warranted urgent treatment in the form of antibiotics, which would have combatted the bacteria in the bloodstream, and could have easily prevented the patient’s wrongful death. However, the patient’s blood was never tested in the first place.

MediVisuals + High Impact’s team of visual strategists, artists, and developers can build and customize your digital presentation for any case involving personal injury, medical malpractice, birth trauma - or any subject involving complex information.

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