Medical devices lag in iPod age Patients' safety is at risk, experts say
By Carolyn Y. Johnson, Globe Staff | December 29, 2008 The Boston Globe
A 32-year-old woman was on the operating table for routine gall bladder surgery, and doctors needed a quick X-ray. To keep her chest still while the image was shot, her ventilator was switched off. But the anesthesiologist, distracted by another problem, forgot to turn the breathing machine back on. The woman died.
The case is an extreme example of the kind of error that could be prevented if medical devices were designed to talk to each other, says Dr. Julian Goldman, a Massachusetts General Hospital anesthesiologist who has compiled such instances from across the United States to highlight the need for medical device "connectivity." In this case, he says, synchronizing the X-ray machine with the ventilator, so the image was automatically timed to a natural pause in breathing, would have made it unnecessary to turn it off.
As technology moves forward, people expect the electronic devices of everyday life to work together, from cellphones that can call or text-message other phones, to computers that interconnect with a slew of gadgets. But in the medical world, where the stakes are higher, such flexible interconnection is rare. Each device operates in its own silo.
"It is really unacceptable, and it's one of the reasons we're unable to make dramatic improvements in patient safety," said Goldman, a leader in calling for a new generation of medical devices that talk to each other.
Now the push for greater connectedness in hospital electronics is gaining momentum. The goal is devices that can not only plug into one another, but can also "understand" each other and automatically identify potential life-threatening problems sooner than they would have been caught by busy nurses and doctors.
In October, a task force - including Partners HealthCare, Mass. General, Johns Hopkins Medicine, Kaiser Permanente, and the Boston-based Center for Integration of Medicine and Innovative Technology - released sample language that hospitals can incorporate into contracts with vendors of medical devices, requiring that manufacturers create products capable of communicating with other devices using agreed-upon standards.
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