Patient-Safety Advocate Dennis Quaid Finds Staunch Supporter In Iowa Congressman Bruce Braley

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Posted on 27th April 2010 by gjohnson in Uncategorized

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Actor Dennis Quaid, a crusader for patient-safety improvements after his twins were almost killed by an accidental heparin overdose, has found an ally in U.S. Rep. Bruce Braley, D-Iowa. http://www.brucebraley.com/free_details.asp?id=1

Braley, who spent 23 years as a trial attorney before turning to politics and going to Congress, participated in the first Oversight and Government Reform hearing where Quaid testified about his newborn twins being given near-fatal heparin overdoses at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles in 2007. http://www.brucebraley.com/free_details.asp?id=39

If  life-and-death issues weren’t at stake here, it would almost be amusing to watch a Federal Drug Administration official squirm as Braley grilled him at the hearing. Braley impressed Quaid so much that at the end of the proceedings, the actor thanked the Iowa lawmaker and said he wished that the lawyer was his Congressman.

During the hearing, Quaid testified that drug companies shouldn’t have “immunity from any liability” – an argument that heparin manufacturer Baxter International is making — just because the drugs they sell have been approved by the FDA. Drug companies should be laughed out of court, the nation’s highest court in fact, for trying to make that argument.

The U.S. Supreme Court has in fact decided to hear a case regarding whether the law preempts suits being filed against drug companies, since their medications have FDA approval, Quaid noted during his testimony in Washington.

Quaid has been everywhere, not only D.C. but “The Oprah Winfrey Show” and medical conferences, to talk about his near-tragic experience and plead for safeguards to reduce potentially lethal medical mistakes. His twins are 2 ½ years now, and appear to be healthy despite their touch-and-go experience at Cedars-Sinai. But the problem regarding mistakes with heparin hasn’t been solved.

In a chat not long ago with The Wall Street Journal, Quaid cited a recent and well-publicized case where a toddler died of a heparin overdose caused by an infusion-pump setting mistake in a Nebraska hospital.  http://blogs.wsj.com/health/2010/04/22/patient-safety-the-movie/tab/print/

Quaid had been scheduled to attend the recent world premiere of his documentary, “Chasing Zero: Winning the War on Healthcare Harm” at the International Forum on Quality and Safety in Health Care in Nice, France.

But then Quaid and Dr. Charles Denham, who was in charge of  production of the documentary, couldn’t get to the screening because of the disruption of air travel due to the Icelandic volcano eruption, according to The Journal. Only 500 attendees made it, out of an expected crowd of 3,000, because of the travel disaster.

The documentary, which features Quaid, aired on Discovery Channel April 24 and will be repeated Saturday, May 1. After the documentary airs on TV, Denham and Quaid’s recently merged research foundation, TMIT, will hand out copies of it free to all 5,700 U.S. hospitals to spotlight the importance of adopting the safe practices developed by the National Quality Forum, which crafts voluntary safety rules for hospitals, according to The Journal.

There are an estimated 100,000 deaths each year from medical errors and another 100,000 deaths each year from hospital infections, many of then preventable, according to Quaid and his supporters, like Rep. Braley.


The exact number of these deaths is still unknown because a lot of  states don’t have a standard or mandatory reporting system for injuries caused my medical mistakes, according to Scientific American magazine. http://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/60-second-science/post.cfm?id=deaths-from-avoidable-medical-error-2009-08-10

Let’s see if Rep. Braley helps Quaid make any headway in his quest for patient safety.

 

Software Glitches Result in Excessive Doses of Heparin for Vets

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Posted on 30th January 2009 by gjohnson in Uncategorized

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Date: 1/15/2009

WASHINGTON (AP) — The chairman of the House Veterans Affairs Committee said Thursday he would investigate software glitches at the VA that put patient safety at risk, calling the problems a sign of a “dangerous lack of accountability.”

“VA continues to discover problems and attempts to fix them quietly and internally, and then downplays them as inconsequential and nonthreatening,” said Rep. Bob Filner, D-Calif. “No one expects new software to operate perfectly, but confidence must be inherent in any electronic medical records system.”

The Associated Press reported Wednesday that patients at VA health centers were given incorrect doses of drugs, had needed treatments delayed and may have been exposed to other medical errors due to the glitches that showed faulty displays of their electronic health records.

There is no evidence that any patient was harmed. But the glitches, which began in August and lingered until last month, were not disclosed to patients by the VA even though they sometimes involved infusions of drugs such as heparin for up to 11 hours longer than necessary, according to internal documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act. Heparin, a blood-thinner, can be life-threatening in excessive doses.

The VA’s recent glitches involved medical data — vital signs, lab results, active meds — that sometimes popped up under another patient’s name on the computer screen. Records also failed to clearly display a doctor’s stop order for a treatment, leading to reported cases of unnecessary drug doses.

Documents obtained Thursday by the AP show the glitches may have extended further. In some cases, VA medical centers reported that automated dispensing machines sometimes printed out the wrong patient name when filling prescriptions for outpatients, according to an internal VA memo dated Nov. 5.

“VA bureaucrats consistently refuse to provide necessary information regarding the serious problems that affect veterans and this pattern of secrecy is disconcerting and does enormous harm,” Filner said. “Oversight of this incident will continue.”

Copyright 2009 The Associated Press.

www.heparin-law.com

Drug stayed on hospital shelves despite recall

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Posted on 3rd October 2008 by gjohnson in Uncategorized

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10/02/2008 06:25:19 PM PDT

By SHAYA TAYEFE MOHAJER Associated Press Writer

LOS ANGELES—Nearly 100 pharmacists and the hospitals they work for face fines for failing to remove a blood thinner from their shelves after a federal recall last winter, a state agency said Thursday.

The recalled drug heparin was found 94 times in inspections of all 533 hospitals in California, and at least 16 hospitals administered the drug to patients, according to the state Board of Pharmacy. Fines range from $2,500 to $5,000.

“This was really an alert that the recall system doesn’t work,” Virginia Herold, head of the state’s pharmacy board, told The Associated Press.

Regulators have not released the full list of hospitals involved. However, documents obtained by the Daily Journal show newborns were allegedly given heparin at the University of California San Francisco Medical Center and Children’s Hospital of Central California in Madera. Both hospitals are appealing the charges.

Heparin, which is often used in premature children to prevent blood clots, has come under scrutiny because of accidental life-threatening overdoses given to babies, including actor Dennis Quaid’s newborn twins at a Los Angeles hospital last November. Fourteen other babies received accidental heparin overdoses in July at a hospital in Corpus Christi, Texas.

The Federal Drug Administration issued a drug recall in February because “a higher than usual number” of patients reported adverse effects to heparin, which include chest pain, dizziness and headache.


The state’s Department of Public Health has also launched an investigation to determine whether recalled heparin, Digitex and Procrit caused harm to any patients.

No link has been found, though a state health official said the state will try to ensure recalled drugs are taken out of hospitals.

“Our actions are to act as both a partner and an enforcer to look at what kinds of system breakdowns are taking place, to make sure we don’t have a reoccurrence of this in the future,” Kathleen Billingsley, deputy director of the state’s Center for Healthcare Quality, told the AP.

In March, the state Board of Pharmacy voted 12-0 to give drug makers, wholesalers and pharmacies until Jan. 1, 2011, to start electronically tracking drugs from factory to patient. The electronic tracking system has been delayed a number of times since 2004, when a recall of 175,000 bottles of fake Lipitor, the cholesterol drug, led state regulators to require tracking.

Herold said although it’s unclear whether the tracking system would have prevented this incident, it will give pharmacists a better idea of what is on their shelves.

Last week the Oakbrook Terrace, Ill.-based Joint Commission, an independent, not-for-profit organization health quality group, issued a safety alert asking hospitals nationwide to adopt stricter measures to prevent errors involving blood thinners, including heparin.

Copyright 2008 The Associated Press.