Free The Dane Commission (The Dane Chronicles) by Max Dane Page A

him the most, was that
even the documented mistreatments, came up clean in his last series of tests.
     
     
    And then there were the prescribing
scientists that used the SID program as the interface for their work.
Ryan set his notes down, and picked up another page.
     
    Maybe SID was dropping the ball
somewhere, either misinterpreting what the researcher had said, or incorrectly
passing the information along.
     
    He didn’t like that idea because it was
what SID was exactly designed to do, a hundred times a second, at similar
facilities across the whole world.
Jeff made a good point.
How could the SID program fail at the exact thing it was designed for, and not
be noticed?
     
    One thing Ryan knew was that if the
scientists were having problems of that sort, they would complain. People would
know.
And after seeing it in action, Ryan was completely impressed. The odds of a SID
failure seemed lower that the likelihood of human error in the manual attempt.
     
    These were his best guesses for
introducing error on the research side of this equation, and both of them
seemed like poor suspects.
He wanted to rule them out quickly.
    He needed more information.
     
    Everything he had looked at so far was
from the research perspective. It was time to start looking at the case errors
from the Hospital side. He sent a message to Dorothy Allen asking for a meeting
to discuss his findings, and hopefully get some help.
     
     
    He also wanted to visit David and Jim.
He needed a way to test the manual entry method for prescribing treatments. He
needed to know if a few mistyped keystrokes could really alter the treatments.
For a real test, it would be good to find a terminal and enter some data. After
mistyping a few characters, he could see how the system handled it.
     
    And lastly, he still wasn’t ready to
give up on the field comparisons.
    He’d continue to set up new searches in
the hope that one of them would hit. If they found even one instance it would
prove that a bad entry could make it through the manual input process. Whether
it would actually generate the type of problem he was after was another
question. He was doubtful.
     
     
     
    While waiting for Dorothy’s office to
respond, he headed over to talk with David and Jim. On his way there, Theresa
at the reception desk waved at him and called him over to where she stood,
looking at her monitor.
     
    “Hi Teresa, what’s up?”
    “Take a look at this message I was
copied on. I think this is your project,” she said.
     
      He bent over and looked at where she was pointing. It was a
message from Dorothy Allen to several high ranking administrators and their
assistants.
     
    “Please be advised that another
instance of the unsolved ‘data collisions’ has occurred. A patient
(PT12c332b354a12bh_#12) was subjected to a series of retro-virus (Rtv 2331)
injections resulting in a degraded and inoperable condition.”
     
    The rest of the message was filled with
information about the time, place and details of the patient. He didn’t
understand all of the medical language, but knew enough to get that it wasn’t
good.
He looked at the time stamp, and read 9:43 AM, today.
He wondered when, or if he would hear from Dorothy or Ben regarding this.
Maybe it was circulating around the higher-ups first; it made sense.
    As far as he knew, this was the first
treatment error where someone was hurt.
And it sounded bad.
     
    He said thanks to Theresa and continued
on his way to see David and Jim.
     
    When he arrived, they each seemed
involved in their own projects.
“Excuse me, David. Is there is there any chance you might have a minute for
me?”
     
    Pausing to save what he was working on,
David turned back to Ryan.
“Sure, what’s up?”
    “Well, I need to rule out the possibility that a researcher could make a typo,
when manually prescribing a treatment, resulting in a different treatment by
accident.”
     
    “Ah, the evil typo. Yes, well that’s
not possible,” said