Sure Thing Press

Coming Soon

The Index Case

A Dr. Wade Novel, Book One

Raye Bellinger, MD

The machine saw it first.

In Dallas, the healthiest people in the room are the ones who are dying, and no one can say why.

Dr. Wade Ashford is a hands-on ER doctor who trusts what he can see, touch, and hear at the bedside. He does not trust the new AI diagnostic tool his group has just rolled out across its hospitals. He calls it “the intern,” because it never stops asking questions.

The intern sees a pattern no single emergency room can see. Wade sees a machine that doesn’t know his patients. By the time he listens, it has cost a life, and the answer leads somewhere no machine could follow.

The first novel in a new series from the author of The Neural Fulcrum.

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Cover of The Index Case, A Dr. Wade Novel, by Raye Bellinger, MD

The first page

The man in bed fourteen was the color of an old newspaper, and the night resident had decided what was wrong with him before she pulled back the curtain.

(from the Prologue)

Sample

The override

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.

LANTERN · Patient: DAWSON, KELSEY · 26F
Falling ALT with rising bilirubin and rising INR may reflect declining liver function rather than recovery. Trajectory concerning.
Recommendations:
· Hold discharge.
· Repeat INR in 6 hours.
· Hepatology consultation today.
AcknowledgeDecline with reason

The charts

Her chart had an explanation that fit. So do the others.

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

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.

Coming soon · Raye Bellinger, MD · Sure Thing Press

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