this post was submitted on 22 Jan 2025
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[–] [email protected] 32 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (19 children)

I work for a company that manufacturers a comparable product to the cited Terumo device, and I can tell you that it's most likely not greed but pending liability issues.

Those devices aren't in use 24/7, and only need maintenance every 15 uses, so hospital staff trained to work on them get to use their maintenance knowledge like 3-4 times a year, at most. And since there must be a redundancy in the hospital both with machines (1 replacement on hand per 1 in use) as well as staff, this number even goes down since you alternate machines (thus stretching their use without maintenance) and people (so they both get to use their experience).

As a result, you end up with machines that are maintained by certified, yet unprofessional technicians. But since the device ends up with an 'error free' log, if anything were to happen to a patient due to a malfunction, the manufacturer assumes liability; and would then have to try and prove that it's actually a human error by the technician.

The alternatives are either to establish crazy tight recertification windows for the technicians (like every 60-90 days), which is also costly and very annoying for them, and puts a serious strain on hospital staff if all manufacturers were to implement similar mechanisms, or, well, maintain the machines themselves. That way the technicians are better equipped due to doing the same steps routinely, and liability lies with the manufacturer either way.

Not everything is evil corpos at work, sometimes there are actual reasons for certain decisions.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 2 months ago (4 children)

I mean it’s not crazy to say “you fix it, you assume liability” right?

[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 months ago (1 children)

You can say it. Doesn’t mean that a jury will accept it.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago

It would be much better to have a third party examine it and decide who is liable.

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