Dr. Gary Birken is Surgeon-in-Chief of the Joe DiMaggio Children's Hospital in Florida by day and a novelist by night. His previous medical thrillers (Error in Judgment, Final Diagnosis, Plague and Embolus) built upon his first-hand experience in addressing timely medical issues that make the news almost daily. His latest novel, Code 15, is also ripped from the headlines and based on a very serious problem, namely, medical errors. The Institute of Medicine estimates that somewhere between 44,000 to 98,000 patients die in U.S. hospitals each year as the result of such errors, more than motor vehicle accidents, breast cancer or AIDS. (Code 15 is the policy that requires hospitals to report serious medical errors to Florida's Agency for Health Care Administration within 15 days of occurrence.)
The plot centers on Dr. Morgan Connolly, the Chief of Emergency Medicine at the fictional Dade Presbyterian Hospital, whose father, a respected physician in his own right, is murdered just as he's about to head into retirement. Morgan also begins to notice a seemingly unconnected string of deaths caused by Code 15's under her care. Her supervisors think she's losing her edge, and she's forced to go before the Florida AHCA board to defend herself in the face of censure or a loss of her license to practice medicine. As if that wasn't enough, she finds out she's pregnant after her husband has left her and taken up with someone else. Convinced that the Code 15's were not accidental and someone is out to harm her and her unborn child, she takes matters into her own hands and sets out to discover who's behind the increasingly violent vendetta against her.
Dr. Birken has said that his approach to novel writing has "always been to use fiction as a means not only to entertain, but to educate the reader in a particular area of medicine," by first selecting a timely or controversial topic, then weaving a story of suspense around it. His hope is that his readers "will not only enjoy the story's journey but when they are finished, they're more knowledgeable in a specific area of medicine." Of course, in this case it's not just the details of a typical hospital setting and its daily trials and tribulations, it's the darker side of what can go wrong.
A more bizarre incident in Code 15 actually happened, according to Birken: "Someone went into the MRI room with an oxygen tank, and the MRI magnet is so powerful that it sucked the oxygen tank into the MRI machine and injured the patient." Lest his readers fear darkening the door of a hospital again, Birken adds that "We learned how to improve thanks to aviation. Now when I go into the operating room, we have a checklist we have to go through, just like a pilot does a pre-flight check. We match the patient’s number on their ID tag, identify the surgical site, check for allergies and so on."
Has Dr. Birken ever felt threatened the way his female protagonist is in the novel? Aside from being punched in the jaw by a teenage boy during his residency, he's escaped virtually unscathed thus far, although he's aware of the reports of violent crimes in hospitals and made sure that everything in Code 15 is theoretically possible.
Birken's next project, a new work-in-progress medical thriller, turns away from the madman antagonist, as he says, "making the villain a never-before-seen and enigmatic disease that has devastating and horrifying implications that extend well beyond the walls of the hospital."
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