Duane Penshorn is an investigative nonfiction author and thriller writer. A practicing emergency physician, former ER medical director, and hospital chief of staff, he draws on decades of frontline clinical and forensic training to diagnose the hidden corporate frameworks shaping modern life. He writes about what happens when institutional design clashes with real-world patient care, exposing the metrics and bureaucratic bottlenecks that drive clinician burnout and threaten safety.
Penshorn brings the same clinical realism to his fiction as an award-finalist science fiction and medical thriller author. As the founder of Astus Press, he writes across genres to explore the unintended consequences of complex modern systems, advocating for a return to intuition over dashboard compliance. He practices at Baptist Neighborhood Hospital and lives in San Antonio, Texas.
More can be found on his website.
In 1999, researcher Dr. Kathleen Mosier placed 25 experienced pilots in a high-tech flight simulator. Her goal was to measure their response to inaccurate automated alerts. When cockpit instruments indicated an engine fire, the protocol was to verify the condition with other sensors. Instead, every one of the 25 pilots shut down the affected engine, responding to the false positive warning, an error of commission. In another scenario, the simulated …
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Automation bias is the new medical error
