One in a Hundred. Every Single Day.
If you walked into a busy emergency department today and watched a hundred patients come through the doors, statistically, one of them would leave with an unaddressed incidental finding — something spotted on their imaging that no one told them about. Something that, in time, might turn into cancer, or an aneurysm requiring surgery, or worse. Not because anyone was careless. Not because the clinicians didn't care. But because Emergency Medicine is relentless, and the system wasn't built to catch everything.
Incidental findings are a routine byproduct of modern imaging. A CT scan ordered to rule out a pulmonary embolism might quietly reveal a lung nodule. A trauma scan might catch an aortic aneurysm in the making. The radiologist notes it. The report gets filed. And then — far too often — the patient goes home without ever knowing it was there. This isn't a rare edge case. In trauma patients receiving full-body CT scans, incidental findings show up in roughly 30–35% of studies. Across all ER patients, approximately one in twelve will have a new finding they've never been told about. And of that group, about one in twelve will go on to experience a clinically meaningful outcome — cancer within five years, a procedure they should have been told they needed, a condition that could have been managed earlier. The math is sobering: roughly one in every hundred ER patients has something important on an imaging test that deserves a follow-up conversation, and that conversation is not happening.
We've already seen this play out in real life. Shortly after deploying VitalGuard, the system flagged a patient who had visited an emergency department and had imaging that identified a suspicious renal mass. Radiology had noted it. But the patient left the ED without ever being told. VitalGuard caught the gap, the outreach was made, and that patient is now getting the care they need for what turned out to be an active malignancy. It's exactly the kind of outcome that's easy to prevent — but only if you have a system in place to catch it.
Emergency physicians are among the most skilled, fast-thinking clinicians in medicine. But they're also operating at a pace that makes it nearly impossible to manually track down every finding across every report, cross-reference it against every discharge note, and then personally ensure every patient received clear communication before they left — or after. The problem isn't effort or intent. It's infrastructure. There hasn't been a reliable, scalable way to close this loop — until now. Beyond the very real human stakes, the medico-legal exposure is significant. Missed incidental findings are among the most common sources of diagnostic error claims in emergency medicine. And from a patient experience standpoint, people simply deserve to know what's happening in their own bodies.
VitalGuard is a new AI-powered system built specifically to close this gap — and built with the realities of clinical workflow in mind. It works by continuously scanning clinical notes, physician documentation, discharge paperwork, and radiology reports to identify incidental findings that appear to have gone uncommunicated. When it finds one, it flags it for review, surfaces the relevant imaging context, and makes it easy for a clinician to act on it quickly. The emphasis on easy is intentional. This isn't a system that creates new burdens for already-stretched staff. A single clinician — in an observation unit, a care coordination role, or a centralized callback team — can monitor findings across an entire facility, or even multiple facilities simultaneously, turning what would otherwise be a logistical nightmare into a manageable, auditable daily task.
When outreach is warranted, VitalGuard gives clinicians the flexibility to call patients directly or send them a secure, personalized message — complete with educational content tailored to their specific finding. Patients can review their imaging, read plain-language explanations of what was found, and formally acknowledge that they've received and understood the information. Every interaction is tracked, every touchpoint is logged, and the status of every outreach is visible in real time.
There's something worth saying plainly: the reason this system exists is because patients deserve better than a finding buried in a report they'll never see. When someone comes to an emergency department, they're often scared, overwhelmed, and trusting that the people caring for them will tell them what they need to know. The fact that a lung nodule or a vascular finding — or renal cancer — might slip through the cracks, not from negligence but from the sheer volume and pace of emergency care, is exactly the kind of problem that technology should solve. VitalGuard is live and running in hospitals today. The infrastructure is built. The workflows are proven. And for health systems ready to take this step, the time to close this gap is now.