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Preventing 'System Failures'
In the HIMSS opening keynote, actor Dennis Quaid recounted what he called one of the most frightening times of his life: in November 2007, when his newborn twins received a thousands-times-greater dosage of the blood thinner Heparin than they should have during a stay at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles.
The ostensible reason was 10-unit and 10,000-unit dosage bottles that looked almost identical, but the broad implication, Quaid said, was a "system failure:" a lack of oversight, technological or otherwise, that combined with human error made for a dangerous situation. Quaid pleaded with HIMSS attendees to get health-care IT to a point where overworked medical staff would have a "backup" in 21st century technology.
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