Index Case, The

This audiobook is narrated by a digital voice. The machine saw it first. The doctor overrode it. Dr. Wade Ashford has worked emergency rooms around Dallas for nineteen years. He trusts a good history, a cup of bad coffee, and his own judgment, in that order. When his physician group installs LANTERN, an AI that reads every chart and flags what it finds, Wade treats it the way he treats every new thing that beeps: he clicks Decline and keeps working. Then a twenty-six-year-old runner named Kelsey Dawson dies of liver failure. LANTERN had flagged her. Wade had overridden it. Her chart had an explanation that fit. So do the others: a young framer who drinks on Saturdays, a ranch wife, a schoolteacher, a retired professor whose note reads presumed alcohol-related. Each one makes sense alone. Together they make no sense at all. And every one of these patients, asked the right way, says the same thing: they have never taken better care of themselves. The pattern runs through seven emergency rooms, a wildly popular green wellness powder, a charismatic founder, and a study that was honest but far too short. It reaches Wade's own family, his childhood friend, and his mother's kitchen. To follow it, Wade has to do the thing he has refused to do: sit down with the machine and ask it a better question. The Index Case is a medical mystery about pride, grief, the stories we tell about our patients, and what happens when a stubborn doctor finally learns to work with the one colleague who never sleeps. Book one of the Dr. Wade novels, unabridged, narrated by Andrew, a digital voice. Raye Bellinger, MD, is a cardiologist with more than forty years at the bedside. He is the author of eight books of nonfiction and the novel The Neural Fulcrum.