Quaid to address ‘broken healthcare system’

By Kristin Courtemanche, Contributing Writer

CHICAGO — In November of 2007, the newborn twins of celebrated actor Dennis Quaid and his wife Kimberly were twice administered massive overdoses of the anticoagulant heparin. The twins survived, after an extended crisis during which their doctors at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center struggled to save them, but sadly the error was not an isolated one.

Scores of babies have been administered Heparin instead of Hep-Lock, a diluted form of the anticoagulant. Heparin is one thousand times the strength of Hep-Lock, and several babies who received the incorrect dosage died, including three at Methodist Hospital in Indianapolis only a year prior to the Quaids’ incident.

The problem, as Quaid describes it, is a “chain of human errors,” beginning with the manufacturer’s near-identical packaging of Heparin and Hep-Lock, pharmacies releasing the incorrect version and hospital nurses administering the wrong version without carefully checking labels.

As Quaid said in a March 2008 interview on CBS’s 60 Minutes, “These mistakes that occurred to us are not unique. They happen in every hospital, in every state in this country.” Dedicated to heightening public awareness of these kinds of errors, Quaid and his wife launched The Quaid Foundation, an organization with a mission to create transparency and accountability in the healthcare industry.

Quaid also spoke before Congress in May 2008 about his family’s ordeal, recommending that consumers in similar situations should have the right to sue drug manufacturers under state law without federal interference. The Quaid family has a lawsuit pending with Hep-Lock manufacturer Baxter Healthcare Corp.

The Quaid family reached a settlement late last year with Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, but their work to eliminate preventable medical errors continues.

Quaid will deliver his keynote presentation, “Dennis Quaid and the Quaid Foundation Story,” on Sunday, April 5, at 12:30 PM. Dennis Quaid’s keynote is sponsored by Siemens/EMC2.

Edits to factual errors in this story were made on March 11, 2009.

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