誰都會犯錯，特別是在計算器或電子表格里處理數字時。計算自己在披薩上花了多少錢是件小事，而醫院里管理藥品時，一點兒的差錯都可能是致命的，那么，怎么來減少誤差的出現呢？

Medical Systems That First Do No Harm

Everyone makes mistakes, especially when it comes to entering numbers into a calculator or spreadsheet. It’s not such a big deal if you’re tracking how much you spend on pizza. But if you’re administering drugs in a hospital, such a slip can be deadly. Now a report in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface [see Harold Thimbleby and Paul Cairns, http://bit.ly/cqcD83] shows how devices can be programmed to catch at least some mistakes on the spot.

Dosing a patient with 10 times too much medication is disturbingly common. One study suggests this error occurs in 1 percent of all hospital admissions. And though the person punching in the numbers is at fault, most drug-delivery devices don’t help.

In one machine, for example, mistakenly entering a number with two decimal points—like 1.2.3—might be read by the machine as 1.23, or as a 123. To prevent such wild guessing, scientists tested a system that immediately flags any input that’s not a real number. According to their analysis, that safeguard alone could cut factor-of-10 errors in half.

Charles Darwin once noted that “to kill an error is as good a service as…establishing a new truth or fact.” Even more so when killing the error keeps you from killing a patient.

—Karen Hopkin