What happens when your electronic medical records (EMR) system, housing thousands of patient records, suffers, from a sickness of its own? A sickness known as a mapping error? In 2003, that’s exactly what happened at St. Mary’s Mercy Medical Center in Grand Rapids, Michigan. And guess what happened? 8,500 patients “died.”

Well no, not really. Patients who had procedures done from October 25 through December 11 of the previous year “died” according to a glitch in the hospital’s patient management system.

Oops.

Good news: They were not dead!

Bad news: The system still thought they were dead. And treated them that way. And that system told other systems.

Jeremy and Alyssa examine the very real-world consequences of this coding error. How could this happen? Could it happen again? Tune in to find out.