New tech falls in the wrong hands in heart-stopping medical thriller

Drexel Hospital prepares to launch its vaunted new Electronic Health Records (EHR) system when a series of inexplicable deaths at the hospital raises questions for a cadre of Drexel employees committed to patient privacy and safety in "Coded to Kill" by Marschall Runge, M.D.

A decade in the making, the Drexel EHR is the most innovative technology to promise a revolution in the healthcare industry. More than just a database, the system uses state-of-the-art artificial intelligence and machine learning advances to “quickly and accurately diagnose every human malady.” Housing four million real-time medical records and boasting the “most secure firewall in the world,” Drexel’s EHR is on the cusp of revolutionizing healthcare and becoming the national standard.

But in the hands of two men, it is a tool of unrestricted power.

Burning with ambition, both Charles Richmond, head of the National Institute for Medical Safety, and Hugh Torrence, an ex-Army and former National Security Agency operative, are “bastions of an establishment that required both light and dark to survive.” Torrence lives in the shadows, as does his small clique of brilliant IT “nerds” who work out of an underground bunker called The Cellar, a surveillance command and control center that sees and hears all, seemingly everywhere at once.

Meanwhile, Senator Elvin Walters — a presidential hopeful waging war against the new electronic record system — is one of Drexel Hospital’s “anonymous” patients, seeking care for a longtime heart condition. With his team of tech wizards, Torrence can use the EHR to cause havoc with the push of a button, with no paper trail and no fingerprints. But first, other loose ends need cleaning up, and a rash of inexplicable patient deaths at Drexel points to the need for a...