Certa Dose, Inc.

Our Story

If you want to change the world, you might think that you’ll need a highly technical, complex idea. Quite often, however, all it takes is a simple idea to have a profound impact. Certa Dose’s story is about a real-life event where a near overdose in the emergency room inspired a simple solution to one of medicine’s most challenging problems. For Dr. Caleb Hernandez, having a 5-year-old girl almost die under his watch because of a dosing error inspired him to find a better way.

Caleb, an emergency room physician, was in the middle of a busy shift when paramedics rushed in with a five-year-old girl in respiratory and cardiac arrest. Caleb started CPR immediately as her parents pleaded for their little girl's life. He called out orders for several medications while he prepared to insert a breathing tube. “With a critical child,” Caleb explains, "we often need to order five or more doses of medication in a short period of time.” While trying to revive the lifeless child, he noticed that a nurse was about to administer an overdose. Caleb alerted the nurse and averted the potential overdose. They corrected the error and the emergency room team was able to bring the little girl back to life.

After helping save the girl’s life, Caleb recalls, “I was reflecting in the ER and saw the unused syringe filled with a ten times overdose. I knew that if we had given the child that amount of medicine she wouldn’t be alive. I realized that the current approach to dosing children doesn’t make sense—why ask health care professionals to effectively take a complex math test under incredible stress while they are busy practicing medicine and trying to save a life?” ​

The problem of dosing error often arises because doctors and nurses use different systems to measure medicines. The complicated math needed to convert one standard to the other based on the patient’s weight can lead to mistakes, especially in emergencies. Caleb’s simple but powerful innovation was to take a pediatric color-coding system already broadly used by health care professionals and place it on the syringe. His company, Certa Dose, has introduced its first products based on his ideas. As Caleb explains, “It effectively provides a Rosetta Stone for pediatric dosing, making it simple and intuitive to confirm the correct dose. This gets everyone on the same page.”

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