Karl and his wife were having some kind of trouble. It wasn’t clear at first what the difficulty was, but they were walking in and out of the waiting room talking to the clerical staff and eventually to the Director of Imaging. It was hard not to hear their conversation.
Karl had a white band around his wrist. They put these strips on us every day when we first show up: full name, birth date, medical record number and an electronic bar code — all to make sure they know who we are. The problem was that in spite of this system, something had gone wrong with Karl’s identity.
“Yesterday his wrist band had his correct name,” Karl’s wife was explaining, “but it had the wrong record number and the wrong birth date.”
I inwardly cringed. I write medical software for a living, and I knew they just had a big software upgrade. I didn’t even want to think what kind of system-wide bug was behind Karl’s wife’s observation.
It was pretty clear that the Director of Imaging was also alarmed.
It was difficult to hear the details, but despite my effort not to eavesdrop, it was clear that the director was not 100% sure that the image he was looking at was indeed an image of Karl’s brain.
“You know,” Karl’s wife explained, “the technician must have been looking at the right information on the screen, because when he spoke with us, he got it all right.”
The Director was calm and polite but clearly increasingly concerned, which is a really good thing. Because if they’re going to make decisions based on an image, they’d better know that they’re looking at whom they think they’re looking at.
“I’m sorry,” the Director said. “If you’ll wait for me here, I’ll go get this straightened out.”
I hope they did.