Actor Dennis Quaid, whose twins were given an overdose of a blood thinner as newborns at a California hospital, toured a Dallas hospital on Tuesday to learn about a system to prevent such errors.
Officials at Children's Medical Center Dallas showed Quaid and his wife, Kimberly, the hospital's system of bar-coding medications to allow the drugs to be tracked electronically from the point of dispensing until being administered to the patient.
"This system here at Children's Medical Center, I'm really amazed ... it's beyond cutting edge," Quaid said at a news conference after the tour.
"I was so encouraged here to see this being implemented."
He compared the barcoding system to alarms in place in aviation.
"Human error is going to happen," he said. "I make mistakes, only I get take two."
Quaid's twins, born Nov. 8 to a surrogate mother, recovered from an overdose of heparin.
He said the twins got staff infections shortly after their birth and were taken to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, where they suffered the overdose Nov. 18.
They had been receiving intravenous medications, and the heparin was used to flush the catheters to prevent clotting. But his children were mistakenly administered the wrong version of the blood thinner and got 1,000 times the correct dose.
Two concentrations of the drug were bottled with similar labels and size. Quaid has said that when rotated slightly, the light blue 10-unit bottle and the 10,000-unit dark blue bottle are hard to tell apart.
Quaid called the incident "a nightmare to live through."
"At the beginning there was a lot of anger, shock and fear," he said.
But he said that his anger has turned to a desire to raise awareness about medical errors in medications and he's even formed The Quaid Foundation to help accomplish that.
"We certainly don't blame the nurse, but everybody makes mistakes," he said. "It was just a breakdown."
He said his twins _ Thomas Boone and Zoe Grace _ are now eight months old and are doing "fantastic."
In December, Quaid and his wife sued Baxter Healthcare Corp., based in Deerfield, Ill., saying the drug maker was negligent in packaging different doses of the product in similar vials with blue backgrounds.
A January report from the California Department of Public Health said that Cedars-Sinai did not adequately educate staff about safe use of heparin and that nurses sometimes failed to adequately read labels on vials of the drug.
This month in Corpus Christi, 14 babies got overdoses of heparin at Christus Spohn Hospital South after pharmacy workers made what the hospital called a "mixing error."
Two of the babies involved _ twins who were born one month premature _ died, although the hospital said its physicians have found no direct links to the overdose. Autopsies are being performed.
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