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Advanced medical technology may extend life, but it can also make it more difficult to know exactly when a patient’s death occurs, writes the Geisel School of Medicine’s Tim Lahey in an opinion piece in The Atlantic.

Citing the death of a patient, Lahey writes, “All the green EKG tracing could tell us was that there was some electrical activity in the heart—it couldn’t tell us when the activity that kept her alive became the activity of the heart simply shutting down. Sometimes machine signals are meaningful, but other times they’re just noise.”

Lahey is an associate professor of medicine and of microbiology and immunology at Geisel.

Read the full opinion piece, published 3/11/15 by The Atlantic.