We’re 3% Away from Zero …and what it will take to close the gap.
Twenty years ago, I made a tenfold dosing error on a child. I have never stopped thinking about it. It is the reason Handtevy exists, and it is the reason I will not stop until we get this right.
This year, we got closer than we have ever been.
Maia Dorsett, MD, PhD, and her team at the University of Rochester published a multi-year quality improvement study documenting what happened when our platform was implemented across the Monroe-Livingston EMS System in upstate New York. More than 50 agencies. More than 350 paramedics. At baseline, 79% of first-dose pediatric medications were correctly dosed. By December 2025, they had reached and sustained 97%, the highest pediatric medication dosing accuracy ever reported in the prehospital literature.
But the number alone is not what I want you to take from this. What Maia’s team did was build real QI infrastructure around the platform. Monthly data review. Case-by-case error analysis. When midazolam errors persisted despite platform access, they did not retrain. They redesigned how the dose was displayed, making the correct route and dose visually dominant. That human factors intervention moved the needle where education could not.
Sound familiar? It is the same reason the best resuscitation agencies in the country do not just know the algorithm. They measure CPR fraction, compression rate, and time to first shock, and they feed it back relentlessly. You do not find the problem until you look for it.
So here we are. 97%. Three percent away from zero.
That remaining 3% is not a calculation problem. It is a verification problem. Medications drawn up from memory. A vial with an unexpected concentration. Moments the platform never got opened. A dosing reference, no matter how good, cannot fully close that gap.
ScanSafe can. By scanning the medication barcode at the point of care, clinicians can confirm the right drug, the right concentration, and the right dose before it reaches the patient. Hospitals have used this principle for years. We have now brought it to the field.
For the first time, zero is within reach. I am not ready to stop at 97.
About the Author
Peter Antevy, MD, FAEMS is a board-certified pediatric emergency medicine physician, EMS medical director, and the Founder and Chief Medical Officer of
Handtevy. He has spent his career focused on improving emergency care for both adults and children, with a particular emphasis on medication safety, resuscitation, and closing the gap between evidence-based medicine and what happens in the field and at the bedside.
Dr. Antevy serves as an EMS medical director in South Florida, where he oversees some of the busiest prehospital systems in the country. He is a nationally recognized speaker, researcher, and educator in emergency medicine, and has been instrumental in advancing pediatric readiness across EMS and hospital systems nationwide.
Through Handtevy, Dr. Antevy and his team support close to 3,000 EMS and hospital customers across all 50 states with purpose-built clinical decision support tools designed to reduce medication errors and improve outcomes during the most critical moments in patient care.
DISCLAIMER: These links are provided for research and do not have affiliations with Handtevy.