Comment on Medical Device Company Tells Hospitals They're No Longer Allowed to Fix Machine That Costs Six Figures

• viking@infosec.pub ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  I can’t speak for Terumo, in my books this has always been an issue, so maybe their management assessed how many casualties resulted out of poorly maintained machines and decided that enough is enough.

  I’ve explained in a bit more details further down in the comments, the liability issue stems from the fact that people can (and do!) die due to wrongly maintained machines, and this falls back on the manufacturer, since they are the ones who trained the technician who then “certified” the machine. But given that they only do one maintenance run every half year or so, they are far from experts. So either you re-train them once a quarter (during training they work on actual machines that have been modified to throw certain errors, and give them hands-on training to fix it); or you do it yourself. Training usually takes 2 days since there’s quite some theory to cover before the practical stuff; and the training usually happens in our HQ, so include 2 travel days.

  If hospital staff is missing 4 days per quarter for one device maintenance workshop, imagine how this will look like if there are 10+ machines they need to be comfortable working with that follow similar re-certification routines. Those people would be gone for 40+ days over a 90 day period. If you account for weekends and time off, they’d essentially be at work for maybe 2 weeks, and someone would have to be on call during the time for other machines in need of maintenance, so you’d end up having to hire 10 times the number of technicians just so that someone is always at work if and when needed.

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