The drug Heparin is in the headlines because once again, tiny babies were mistakenly given too much of the anticoagulant used to prevent intravenous blood clots and keep IV lines clear.

This time the overdose isn't being blamed on the company's bad labeling, however. The mistake in this case is co completely due to human error. Hospital pharmacists in a Texas hospital mixed up too strong a dose of Heparin which resulted in seventeen babies being given 100x's the recommended dosage for their size. Two premature siblings have died, but it is not yet known if their deaths were Heparin-related or due to other factors.

Just a couple months ago, actor Dennis Quaid testified before a House committee about the agony his family went through when his newborn twins were given a Heparin overdose. The experience spurred Quaid and his wife to start The Quaid Foundation in order to bring attention to the devastation human error can have in a hospital setting. The site contains a link for people to sign an online petition for the Health Care Quality Improvement Act, that would allow Physicians and nurses to whistle blow without being fired or given penalties for reporting potentially dangerous practices within their work environment.

While it's too late to help the babies in this latest incident, it seems pretty clear that the medical community needs more effective safeguards to protect patients, especially the tiniest ones.

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Dennis Quaid and his wife Kimberly have had a rough time lately in Los Angeles. In November, their newborn twins almost died after accidentally being overdosed with the anti-coagulant drug Heparin and in May, Quaid testified before a House committee about his experience. Thankfully, twins Thomas Boone and Zoe Grace are both doing fine now and Quaid and company are anxious to put the nightmare behind them.

Like many of us who face near-tragedy, Dennis and Kimberly have decided that what matters most in life is family and friends and the couple are making some changes. Quaid says that he and the family are quitting Los Angeles and returning to his hometown of Houston, Texas. "The train is going down the tracks!" he says. "We have a lot of family there and we have a really nice plot of land," he says. "We have 30 or 40 friends and family members within two miles of us. Its kind of a no-brainer."

The children's near-death experience may be in the past now, but it will never be forgotten. To help ensure that what happened to them doesn't happen to someone else, Dennis and Kimberly have started a foundation to help minimize the risk of human error in hospitals. The first step, says Quaid, is making use of barcode technology. "With a bar code, [a nurse] can scan the medicine and scan the bracelet of the patient. Scan her own tag and if there's a mistake, it will come up."

What happened to those babies was an unimaginable nightmare. I don't blame the Dennis and Kimberly one bit for wanting a fresh start and I especially admire their efforts to try to make something good come out of something so bad.

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It was one of those events that's hard to even imagine going through. When Dennis and Kimberly Quaid's 12-day-old twins were accidentally given 1,000 times the proper dose of Hep-Lock, a blood thinner, no one was sure if they would survive (they did, thankfully). The thing is, it wasn't the first time it had happened. In 2006, six other babies were given an overdose of Hep-Lock in an Indianapolis hospital. Only three of those babies survived.

Last week, Dennis Quaid testified before a House committee about his experience. Rather than sue the hospital, the couple decided last year to make a case against Baxter, the drug maker itself. They say that Baxter knew about the labeling trouble with Hep-Lock, yet did not recall the bottles when they had a chance.

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Around the very time her newborn babies were struggling for survival in the hospital after accidentally being overdosed with Heparin, Kimberly Quaid shared on 60 Minutes that miles away at home, she felt something was very, very wrong with her children.

"I just had this horrible feeling come over me, and I felt like the babies were passing. I just had this feeling of dread."

So strong was her feeling, that she called the hospital just to be sure everything was okay, and even though she was assured everything was fine, Quaid jotted down a note: 9 PM SOMETHING HAPPENED TO BABIES!

She wouldn't learn about the dosage blunder until the next morning when she and her husband visited the babies at their usual time.

Some research has even hinted that that mother's intuition can start before even giving birth. Woman with no gender preference for their unborn child were able to correctly choose what the sex of their baby was going to be with a 70% accuracy rate.

Sometimes I just know things about my kids, but it is usually right after an unusual length of silence. Every mom knows Quiet = Something Bad Going On.

Have you ever experienced mother's intuition?

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There are frivolous legal actions and then there are those that might prevent others from experiencing the same horrific nightmare you or your loved ones went through.

I'd put the suit Dennis and Kimberly Quaid have filed against Baxter Healthcare Corporation, maker of the anti-coagulant Heparin in the latter category. The Quaids are taking action based on their assertion that the company knew of previous dosage mix-ups, yet did not recall shipments of the drug or properly warn hospitals of the dangers.
The packaging of Heparin in the 10-units-per-milliliter vial and the 10,000-units-per-milliliter are virtually identical.

The Quaids' newborn premature twins were accidentally give 1,000 times the recommended dose twice at Cedar-Sinai Medical Center before the error was realized.

The couple had not decided whether to file suit against Cedars-Sinai, saying they want to see what steps the hospital takes to prevent such errors from happening again.

Cedars-Sinai has removed all heparin used for IV flushes from the pediatric unit and will instead use only a saline solution. The hospital is also retraining 1,800 nurses and 200 pharmacy staff members in medication administration, requiring a refresher course before any of them treat patients.

This is not the first time confusion over Heparin packaging has been a problem. In 2006, three premature babies in Indiana died after a hospital had what looks like an identical Heparin dosage mix-up.

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TMZ is reporting that up to thirteen patients at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles were given higher doses of the anti-coagulant, Heparin, including the newborn twins of actor Dennis Quaid.

According the source, a technician put the drug in wrong place and a nurse grabbed and administered it without noticing. The babies were each mistakenly given two doses of 10,000 units of Heparin before they started bleeding out. Heparin is used to flush out IV lines and prevent blood clots. A typical dose for an infant is 10 units.

Both babies are in the neo-natal intensive care until at Cedars-Sinai where they are said to be in stable condition.

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Actor Dennis Quaid and wife Kimberly became the proud parents of a new son and daughter on Thursday.

Baby Thomas Boone was 6 lb. 12 oz., and sister Zoe Grace was a bit tinier, weighing only at 5 lb. 9 oz.

Quaid is known for his starring roles in family movies like: The Parent Trap, Yours, Mine & Ours, The Rookie, as well as adult films such as Frequency, Traffic, The Day After Tomorrow and many, many more.

Dennis and Kimberly were married on the 4th of July in 2004. He has a fifteen year old son, Jack Henry, with ex-wife actress Meg Ryan.

In a statement about the birth of their twins, the Quaids said, "God has definitely blessed us."

The twins were born by gestation surrogate using the Quaids' sperm and eggs, which mean some lucky woman gets to say she had Dennis Quaid's babies, yet the poor thing never even saw him naked.

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