There are lots of ways to make this scene a lot more complicated then it really needs to be.

There truly are. But for a fictional purpose, and because I am sure Sam wants to keep the action moving, and not get bogged down into a technical dialog, keeping it as simply as possible is probably the best choice. Especially because her target readers are most likely not as technical as the AO crowd is.

My personal experience is that small to medium sized hospital tend toward lotus notes, and the small doc in a box office that are connecting to them are using a VPN configured by the hospital IT staff, or Outlook. But for the one or two doc shops, some use Outlook, but I was somewhat surprized to see how many of them use ACT! for a contact mananger/PIM.

Getting back to my point is a round about way, not a single one of these shops would guess someone had access their computers, unless it was while they had stepped out of the room, and came back and found the desktop or screen different. But over a weekend? Nah. They wouldnt even know to look for any differences.

If they DID happen to think someone had accessed their system, they are more likely to call a local computer shop. Their express area of interest would be PATIENT RECORDS not they PIM. They would only really care about that if the information was lost or altered, OR is they might be held liable for it. Seriously thou. I cant think of a single person in the health care field that wouldnt just miss completely that someone had rebooted their computer/server with a LiveCD. As long as everything worked when they came back into the office Monday, they would never have a reason to check the logs.

Cheers!