Coded to Kill

Michigan Medicine CEO and Dean of the University of Michigan Medical School, Dr. Marschall Runge, warns of the dangers rooted in the advancement of medical technology in his new ripped-from-headlines thriller, “Coded to Kill” (Post Hill Press, June 13, 2023).

About the book: Is medicine’s greatest breakthrough also the world’s most efficient killing machine? After a decade of development, the cutting-edge Electronic Health Records system is about to become the national standard. Housing the real-time medical records of every American, the EHR system will enable doctors to access records with a keystroke and issue life-or-death medical orders with a finger swipe.

No one wants the EHR to succeed more than Hugh Torrence, a former NSA honcho who sees the system as a tool for unimaginable and unaccountable power. The only thing standing in his way is a loose-knit group of Drexel employees with conflicting agendas and questionable loyalties. While they search for answers, the suspicious patient deaths keep mounting...and the target on their back grows larger.

MARSCHALL RUNGE, MD, PhD, is the executive vice president for Medical Affairs at the University of Michigan, dean of the Medical School, and CEO of Michigan Medicine. He earned his doctorate in molecular biology at Vanderbilt University and his medical degree from Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, where he also completed a residency in internal medicine. He was a cardiology fellow at the Massachusetts General Hospital. He is the author of over 250 publications and holds five patents for novel approaches to health care. As a Texas native who spent fifteen years in North Carolina and an avid thriller reader, Runge has experienced so many you-can’t-make-this-up events that his transition to fiction was inevitable.