I work for a company that manufacturers a comparably 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 alternatemachines (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 errorby the technician.
The alternatives are either to establish crazy right 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.
Ajen@sh.itjust.works 1 year ago
From what I understand, this is common among larger med tech companies like Fisher and Beckman. I’m not trying to justify it, but I’m also not sure it’s newsworthy.