Actor Dennis Quaid, who is slated as one of the keynote speakers at HIMSS09, the annual conference of the Healthcare Information and Management Society, is scheduled to appear on "The Oprah Winfrey Show" Tuesday to talk about medical errors.
Oprah airs in the mornings in some parts of the country and in the afternoons in others. The show also airs on different networks. The show is also available online at oprah.com.
Oprah will join Quaid as he returns to Cedars Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, where in November 2007 his 12-day-old twin babies, Thomas and Zoe, developed a staph infection and had to be hospitalized. The babies were mistakenly given an overdose (a thousand times the recommended dose) of heparin, a blood thinner.
The babies recovered, though Quaid has said in interviews that no one knows what the long-term effects might be.
He has also said that while supermarkets use bar-coding to track and identify products, such systems remain rare in the healthcare setting for identifying drugs.
Every year in the United States, more people die from medical mistakes than from breast cancer, AIDS and car accidents combined. "It's a major, major health issue that will touch almost every single American at one point in our lives," Oprah says as the show opens.
Quaid tells Oprah the ordeal happened for a reason.
"I think that the reason is to raise public awareness and to get something done about computerized record keeping and bar coding in hospitals," he says. "That's going to save lives-a lot of lives."
Also appearing on the show to discuss medical errors is regular guest Mehmet Oz, MD, vice chairman and professor of surgery at Columbia University. He directs the Cardiovascular Institute and Complementary Medicine Program at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital.
Harpo Productions said in a news release that Quaid and his wife, Kimberly, wanted to visit Cedars-Sinai Medical Center to see what steps have been taken to ensure a similar mistake won't happen again.
The Quaids settled with the hospital for $750,000 in December.
Dennis Quaid photo by Bridgette Blair and obtained from Public Citizen under Creative Commons license. Photos of Oprah Winfrey and Mehmet Oz obtained from Wikimedia Commons.
