App prevents overdosing to save lives

Dr. Harvey Castro, blogger and Medical Editor for iPhone Life magazine, has created an app to prevent inadvertent over dosing from health professionals. IV MEDS has information on 45 intravenous medications and helps doctors and nurses calculate the doses for various concentrations. The app emphasizes that it's not a substitute for manual calculations by the health care provider, but rather serves as a valuable cross check. My personal feeling is that more of this kind of cross checking is needed, because one sometimes reads about patients who died as a result of getting the wrong dosage. It's sometimes been estimated that hospital errors cause some 100,000 deaths per year. You can learn more from this TV report.