In Texas, a 52-year-old man named David Tran was left in a vegetative state after undergoing a routine appendectomy. The operation went fine—until his anesthesiologist, unaware of Tran’s allergy to a common sedative, administered it anyway. His allergy had been documented in the hospital system, but it was buried deep within a scanned PDF file, not flagged in his immediate record. The hospital had no alert protocol for such flags. The case resulted in a multimillion-dollar lawsuit and a massive overhaul of how patient histories were stored and accessed. Yet, beneath the courtroom drama lay a simple truth: the system had failed again.