A few years ago, a doctor prescribed Singulair, a standard asthma medication, to a 9-year-old boy. At least that’s what the doctor thought he prescribed. Instead, he had accidentally clicked the next medicine listed in the drop-down menu: Sintrom, a blood-thinning medication meant to treat blood clots. Tragically, the boy died. But from that sad story emerged an idea to help save any other families from experiencing that same pain.
Dr. Gidi Stein, a doctor on the faculty of Tel Aviv University, heard the story about the boy at a medical conference and felt compelled to do something. Medicine was already his second or third or fourth career – he had previously studied math and computer science. He got a Ph.D. in computational biology and had served as VP of several startups. Now he was working in internal medicine. “Life was good. I never thought I would do anything else,” Stein told us when From The Grapevine met up with him in Jerusalem.
But he couldn’t shake the story of the boy and his doctor. “It was like killing someone with a typo. He just clicked on the wrong button,” Stein said. “One would’ve thought there’d be some kind of spell-checker to prevent these terrible tragedies from happening. But apparently this is not the case.”