§ 8.01-581.18:1.Immunity of physicians for laboratory results and examinations.

This section is the flip side of § 8.01-581.18’s notice requirement: it protects physicians from liability for not reviewing or acting on lab results they neither ordered nor authorized. That default protection has three exceptions that can strip it away — if the patient handed the report directly to the physician along with a request for consultation, if the physician voluntarily took on responsibility for reviewing or acting on the results, or if the physician had reason to know that reviewing or acting on the pending results was needed to manage the patient’s specific mental or physical condition.

The immunity isn’t automatic even outside those exceptions — the physician has to affirmatively establish one of four specific grounds to claim it: that no physician-patient relationship existed when the results arrived; that the physician received the results without a consultation request and without responsibility for managing that condition; that the physician had consulted on a different condition, the results weren’t part of managing that condition, and the physician had no reason to know of a duty to inform or refer the patient; or that interpreting the results would have exceeded the physician’s scope of practice and the physician had no reason to know of a duty to inform or refer.

For its own purposes, this section defines “physician” as a person licensed to practice medicine, chiropractic, or osteopathy in Virginia under Chapter 29 of Title 54.1 — notably a narrower list than the medicine-podiatry-chiropractic-osteopathy definition that § 8.01-581.18 states governs both sections, a discrepancy worth checking against the official Code text.