> Agyare had instructed Banerjee to hydrate Sam right away but to wait for the results of Sam’s lab work before ordering a chest X-ray or the strong antibiotics used to treat sepsis.

> But Banerjee, a novice, got stuck. He couldn’t figure out how to navigate the template to make some but not all of the auto-populated orders. “This was my first patient that triggered the sepsis pathway,” he explained, in testimony. So he asked Connor Welsh, a third-year resident, for help.

> At 8:50 p.m., Welsh showed Banerjee how. From his own computer, he clicked into a field on Sam’s chart to assert that sepsis was not likely: “Based on my evaluation,” the automated note said, “this patient does not meet clinical criteria for bacterial sepsis.”

The provider was instructed (possibly wisely) to take some of the automated sepsis actions and to defer others. The computer did not allow this without generating an automated note saying “ this patient does not meet clinical criteria for bacterial sepsis.”

Imagine if your email UI auto-classified one particular email as so high priority that it would allow you to do nothing else, including reading other emails, until you archived the priority email and, to for good measure, would auto-reply “no action needed” when you hit archive. You get a priority email, and you determine that the correct action is to wait up to 20 minutes for another email that you expect and, while waiting 20 minutes, to read other emails from the same sender. But you can’t because your UI won’t allow it. So you archive it, send the “no action needed” reply (which is outrageously inappropriate but you don’t actually have any control here), and hope you remember in 20 minutes while you are horribly overworked.

ISTM the patient’s family should consider suing the software vendor.