Coded to Kill

Artificial Intelligence is currently the big hope across most industries as a way of increasing productivity on the cheap. It is being used already in the field of medicine as it is ideal at coping with enormous amounts of data and highlighting anomalies. It aids in finding cancers early, but what are the next steps. Are we going to allow AI to make decisions instead of the doctors? Diagnosis automated and sent to machines to mix drugs or perform operations? In the right hands it sounds wonderful, but in Marschall Runge M.D.’s Coded to Kill we are shown what could happen in the wrong hands. 

The Electronic Health Records (EHR) system is hoping to be the future of medicine, a fully automated system that will monitor a patient so that the medical staff do not have to. Drexel Hospital is the first to implement the programme and if it proves successful it could be rolled out across the US. That is a lot of money for investors, and they will do anything to make it succeed including murdering those who get in the way. What better way than to make these deaths look like a typical medical emergency? Only heart surgeon Dr. Mason Fischer seems to feel that something is not right with EHR, but his own past may make him untrustworthy. 

They say that you should write what you know and that can really help if you are writing a certain type of book. With medicine either a layperson author needs to research very well, or an expert can have a go, but does being an expert in medicine make you a good writer? Runge certainly brings his expertise to Coded, alongside some of his fears for the future of medicine. The book has a classic thriller feel to it, a combination of Child and Crichton. The type of fiction that a reader will pick up and enjoy on their holiday. 

The book works on a breezier note as Runge does not become too obsessive about the medical elements. There is plenty of talk about the bureaucracy of the hospital, but it is all wrapped up in people trying to murder. The EHR is less of an AI and more of a machine learnt diagnosis machine. It is not the programme itself that we need to worry about, but the programmers who are still inside meddling. 

Rather than focussing solely on Dr Fischer’s investigation, Runge spends as much time on the bad people. There are several interested parties, and they work together whilst it suits them. A government insider, a shadowy assassin, and an outspoken politician must all work as one, until they no longer need to. The reader is shown how the programmers go about manipulating the mechanics of a hospital to make a death look natural. They also use their tools to undermine Dr Fischer and throw suspicion his way. This works well as even the reader is unable to trust Dr Fischer as there are skeletons we do not know about. 

I enjoyed Coded as a medical thriller. It is not speculative as you can imagine hackers or wrong entities manipulating the software a hospital uses. There was a little too much men-with-surnames-talking-to-one-other in places, and I did become confused once or twice, but it worked in the whole. The way in which the bad guys are exposed along the way, alongside Dr Fischer, is impressive. You are never able to trust until the very end. A touch more action in the next outing for the characters will really bring the series up to a strong thriller standard.