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Taking Aim at Deadly Pediatric Medication Errors

Founded by an emergency room doctor, color-coordinated syringes and syringe holders provide a simple method to measure and confirm the correct dose of a drug for infants and children.

The Certa Dose system and PALS syringe holder are designed to eliminate the need to make complex mathematical calculations to determine dosage by weight.
The Certa Dose system and PALS syringe holder are designed to eliminate the need to make complex mathematical calculations to determine dosage by weight.

“Each year, 140,000 children are harmed and about 7,000 children die needlessly due to dosing errors by medical professionals,” says Emergency Room Doctor Caleb Hernandez. “We want to make it as easy as possible for medical professionals to give patients the correct doses, especially in high-stress emergency situations where a child’s life is on the line.”

Dr. Hernandez founded Certa Dose, a color-coordinated syringe to provide a simple method to measure and confirm the correct dose for any infant or child. The system, which shows the appropriate amount by weight of a given medication, offers a fast, safe and accurate way to measure children’s medication and helps eliminate dosage errors.

Certa Dose’s first product is an FDA-cleared syringe for use in the administration of epinephrine to pediatric patients. The company aims to gain approval to sell other versions of its syringe, focusing on high-risk anesthesia or pain drugs.


How it works

The patented syringe eliminates the need to make complex mathematical calculations to determine dosage by weight. It works in two steps: measure and match.

“During many emergencies, there is not an opportunity to obtain an accurate weight,” Dr.Hernandez explains, in scenarios such as an active seizure, cardiac arrest, respiratory failure or severe trauma. “Dr. Broselow developed a tape that is used to correlate a child’s ideal body weight to length. This system has been used nationwide for the past three decades.”

The Certa Dose system is weight-based, so when the child’s weight is known, it is correlated with the color chart. Each syringe is labeled with the color zones that match the Broselow tape.

  • Measure: Healthcare professionals, including doctors, nurses and EMTs, use the Broselow tape to measure a child, lining the end up with the child’s head and running the tape next to the child’s body to their heels to register an approximate weight and color zone. With standard syringes, this process still requires the user to make conversions (such as from milligrams to milliliters) to deliver the right amount of the drug.

  • Match: The user matches the patient to the zone on the color scale, and administers the medication to the corresponding color on the Certa Dose syringe.

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LAST CHANCE TO SAVE! New Tech for Life Sciences at PACK EXPO Southeast