Automated Cardiac Defibrillators in Hospitals: No Simple Answers: Pt 1

Our product defect attorneys want to inform you of a critical healthcare debate you might not know about yet. It involves the upgrade from a known, tested, and reliable medical device to one not yet tested in the hospital setting when it was widely adopted.

A little more than 10 years ago, a committee of the American Heart Association recommended that hospitals upgrade their cardiac care technology to include expensive dual-mode defibrillators. A trained doctor, nurse, or medical technician could use the dual-mode defibrillators in the traditional manual mode. These new defibrillators could also turn on automatically and by used by staff with lower skill sets to respond to cardiac arrest conditions. The old manual models cost a little over $1,500. The new dual-mode medical device models cost around $10,000.

Product defect attorneys recognize that without a doubt, the upgrade made sense in theory. But we also know that unseen product defects and potential liabilities often lie hidden within new technologies and products of all sorts. Concerned hospital administrators, doctors and nurses knew that it could take time for properly trained medical personnel to receive notification of and respond to the bedside of a patient suffering a cardiac arrest. Response times might be longer in the wee hours of the night shift.

Having an automated defibrillator that responded to the crisis automatically and that could be used by hospital staff with lower levels of training must have seemed a godsend. And the new device received strong endorsement from a committee of the American Heart Association itself. The committee's recommendation even took a scolding tone towards those hospitals that hadn't yet seen the light and jumped on the dual-mode bandwagon. What more did a concerned hospital need before allocating the budgetary funds to the device?

What these concerned and compliant hospitals probably did not know was that more than 25% of key committee members were beholding to the manufacturers of the dual-mode devices. They might well have had some "conflicts of interest" (as we in the legal field call it) when they made their committee recommendation.

And the dual-mode devices had not yet been evaluated in the hospital setting to see whether they actually improved survival rates. Many theories that sound quite good get shot down in the empirical evidence gathering process. The scientific method is all about putting theories to the test before implementing them.

Continue to Part 2.