The Technology Was Never the Problem

Dan Pettus spent forty years building the machines that were supposed
to prevent that. Brain monitors in operating rooms. Anesthesia records
in Vienna. A box on a kitchen counter that read twenty one different
glucose meters. Infusion pumps wired into the hospital records he
helped write the standards for.

The technology worked. The outcomes did not move.

This is the honest accounting of why, told from the inside by someone
who signed off on the compromises. A vocabulary of care that turned out
to be private property. A public library of medical knowledge almost
nobody used. An industry that spent tens of billions getting very good
at writing things down and never learned to ask a question.

And the one thing that finally changed did not come from medicine
at all. It is running now, you can open it in a browser, and
Chapter 22 is my own list of everything still wrong with it.