HIMSS09 Keynote: Quaid pushes for more efficient use of technology

In the initial keynote address of HIMSS09 on Sunday, actor Dennis Quaid made a plea similar to the one he made at an annual meeting of the Association of Healthcare Journalists last March, imploring all healthcare professionals to become more technologically efficient. Quaid's twin babies, Thomas Boone and Zoe Grace, were nearly killed by an overdose of Heparin shortly after birth at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in 2007; the children were given 1,000-times the common dosage recommended for infants.

"We have this great new technology and we don't use it in a 21^st-century way," Quaid said. He added that bar coding, electronic medical records and computerized physician order entries "need to be commonplace in all hospitals," and that "all this technology should be interoperable."

In sharing his near-tragic story, Quaid set the tone for this year's conference. Much of the Obama administration's allotted $19.1 billion for health IT spending likely will be spent on EMRs; Quaid wants to make sure that that money is "spent wisely."

In updating and improving our healthcare technology, Quaid believes that healthcare professionals will be less likely to make mistakes due to things like bad labeling and lack of sleep; improving "human performance factors" are key.

"If I make a mistake, it's take two, or three or 37; if a caregiver makes a mistake, it could mean somebody's life," he said. "I am not here to denigrate doctors and caregivers--I revere them. All humans make mistakes, and the majority of those mistakes are due to system failures."

Quaid did go on to praise the work of Cedar-Sinai since the incident, saying that he "applauded their efforts." Following his address, HIMSS Board Chairman Charles Christian presented Quaid with a check for $10,000 for his Quaid Foundation, which looks for ways to change drug packaging, as well as ways to incorporate the use of bar-code systems.

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