The Doctor in Sickbay

[Jeffe525]

Not every doctor knows every planet and not every doctor knows every species. Once the medical staff is up to speed the EMH would activated and with that one sentence, it would know all that the med staff needing briefing on. The EMH would be the only one who you could lay any known species in front of and in an instant know what it can do to try to save the victims life.

I agree with this part for sure. Picardo demonstrated many times that he does have access to the Starfleet medical database (or at least Voyager's latest version of it before they got cut off).

The one of the things it needs is greater access to the ships computer and to receive information from a biobed, the sensors in sickbay and the equipment the biobed has.

I see... I think maybe we've been arguing the same point from different angles. With a look or a command, living Doctors have access to all this information. I don't think this was ever settled on the show, but I guess we could assume that the EMH either gets this kind of info like other Doctors or he really is linked to the sickbay sensors (but still goes through the motions of looking at the biobed/tricorder anyway because he's programmed to act like that).

I guess future versions might be more integrated and have more access to more systems, but maybe the Mark I (as a prototype) was designed to be completely separate from sickbay systems as to not cause software compatibility issues (or whatever).