Quality suit hits imaging clinic

A federal class-action filed on April 7 says The Greenbrier Clinic gave more than 1,000 patients mammograms that may have been unreliable, after the clinic itself warned patients on March 23 that image quality over a span from October 28, 2023, to February 26, 2026 could not be trusted. (wvgazettemail.com, wvmetronews.com) This was not a paperwork glitch. A mammogram is an X-ray meant to catch tiny changes in breast tissue, and the federal government requires those images to meet strict quality standards because a blurry or badly produced image can hide a cancer or create a false all-clear. (fda.gov, fda.gov) Congress set those rules in the Mammography Quality Standards Act in 1992, and the Food and Drug Administration says every mammography facility outside the Department of Veterans Affairs must be certified, accredited, inspected at least once a year, and checked for image quality, equipment, radiation dose, staff qualifications, and quality assurance. (fda.gov) The accreditation side matters here because the American College of Radiology reviews a facility’s actual clinical images, and its mammography program tells sites to perform quality-control tests set by the college and the machine maker before those images are judged. (acr.org) When a site fails those standards, the Food and Drug Administration says affected patients and their referring doctors must be told that recent mammograms could have unreliable results. That is why clinics send certified letters in cases like this instead of quietly fixing the machine and moving on. (fda.gov) The Greenbrier Clinic told patients the Food and Drug Administration had ordered it to stop performing mammography on February 26, and local reporting said the trigger was an evaluation by the American College of Radiology that found the facility did not meet required clinical image quality standards. (wvmetronews.com, radiologybusiness.com) The lawsuit turns that quality failure into a consumer case. According to WV MetroNews, lead plaintiff Tabitha Martin says she received a February 13 report calling her screening “benign,” then later learned the clinic no longer stood behind the reliability of that exam. (wvmetronews.com) Her complaint seeks damages for breach of contract, fraudulent representation, and emotional distress, arguing patients paid for a premium screening service and instead got results the clinic later treated as potentially worthless. The suit was filed in the United States District Court for the Southern District of West Virginia and assigned to Judge Frank Volk. (wvmetronews.com, wvgazettemail.com) The Greenbrier Clinic sits inside the Greenbrier resort in White Sulphur Springs, and the complaint says its patient base is unusually national because resort guests come from outside West Virginia. That detail matters because a bad lab result in one town can usually be cleaned up locally, but a bad imaging program tied to a destination clinic can scatter follow-up care across many states. (wvmetronews.com, wvgazettemail.com) That is why this case is bigger than one broken machine. In mammography, image quality control is the lock on the front door, and once that lock fails for two years, the damage spreads at the same speed as the letters, the retesting bills, and the fear of a missed cancer. (fda.gov, fda.gov)