Wow! I didn't know it cost that much?

The renewal fees may be about right, but in 1988, it cost me about £2,600 over three years to get the Patent and it probably costs more today.

Colin Bignell

Reply to
nightjar
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ISTR that for minimally invasive medical devices we were paying about £2,000 for the first £5m and a few hundred for the next £5m, giving us world-wide cover apart from North America and countries using US law, which would have added an extra £1,000.

Colin Bignell

Reply to
nightjar

We were somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the drugs began to take hold. I remember "Mary Fisher" saying something like:

If he can't find it, he could invent one.

Reply to
Grimly Curmudgeon

Please can you explain how could they make any evaluation at all about a system such as Nypro, or Coalite, before the plant blew up. If the risk was known about sufficiently to be estimated surely for heaven's sake it should have been acted upon? Or FTM Prosthetic Breast implants at a point in time when it was a new technology and they can have had no claims experience.

I would have been happy to accept a 15% accuracy and pay 7x the premiums for 100% cover.

It's not my idea, but it is very right that it is required, selling a low cost medical device (Ca. 14k), with total UK market Ca. 200 units, and say 5 or 6 sales in the first year, a single serious claim would blow us out of the water. See Colin's reply.

It arises partly out of the litiginous society we live in. The diseases in which it it would be used in diagnosis rarely have a good outcome. Lung cancer, for instance is not curable at all, 0% in fact, but it can be palliated. If you get it you will die of it, unless something else gets you first.

If, in the end a patient had the worst outcome. The mere mention, by a patient with end stage lung cancer, of the fact that the hospital had used a novel diagnostic technique which saved a lot of money for the hospital, to a claims lawyer would be enough to start off a lot of expensive lawyer time at up to £1,000 per hour.

On account of this patients in the UK continue to have to be punctured in the chest or abdomen with a 7" needle, guided by a ruler and a protractor (instead of a micoprocessor controlled self calibrating laser device), typically 3 to 7 times per biopsy whereas in countries which have less "developed" Legal systems such as Egypt and Saudi Arabia, but simply buy in the best medical technologies available anywhere in the world, patients are saved this pain and morbidity.

there, we have it !

DG

Reply to
Derek Geldard

You can never say you're cured of ANY cancer until you die of something else.

...

That isn't what happened to me.

As for people making claims, I wouldn't. I accept that medics aren't magicians and that everyone makes mistakes. It's tough if I happen to suffer from a mistake. I don't give a reward if it's successful and I doubt that anyone else does.

Mary

Mary

Reply to
Mary Fisher

When we started making needles, product liability insurance really wasn't available, so we simply set the business up as a limited company and accepted that it might go down if there was a successful claim.

...

I'm not quite sure how spending £14k to replace a ruler and protractor is going to save the NHS Trust a lot of money. However, it would be the NHS Trust who got sued and the product supplier would only get involved if it could be shown that problems arose due to a fault in the product. Even then, they would only be liable if they could be shown to have been negligent.

I suspect that asking the NHS to spend nearly £3 million to replace a system their consultants are currently happy with is the main problem. You need to get a respected expert in the field to write an article for the BMJ praising your system as the answer to a number of problems before anyone is likely to consider buying it.

Colin Bignell

Reply to
nightjar

A radiologist charged my wife £220 for a 10 minute appointment. One extra billable appointment per day would pay for it in 4 months.

Much the same could have been said about the first laser levels, which cost in the region of GBP 500 or more in todays money just to replace a plumbob and a length of string, but small jobbing builders bought them.

It is, together with the fact that there is no mechanism for cost savings to be measured and waste is simply reflected in longer waiting times. The same consultant might at one time have been content to drive a "Sit up and beg" side valve Ford Anglia, yet somehow quite expensive improvements were brought in.

Pity that nobody asks the patient how he feels about having his liver punctured 3 to 7 times, as opposed to once.

Also very true. The one product we have that has been very successful was so because the acknowledged expert in the field was commissioned to write a report for the government which just happened to mention en passant "This amount of work can only be done using an automated ", and Bingo 150 hospitals were given the funding for 2 units @ £23k each.

DG

Reply to
Derek Geldard

That's because IIAC you didn't have a liver or lung biopsy.

If you are referring to a breast biopsy you have already benefited from a high-tech localisation proceadure. Breast biopsies have been done under the guidance of stereotactic radiology since before I got professionally involved in the diagnosis of breast cancer in 1988.

It requires 2, 2 dimensional images taken at 2 different angles to be correlated to localise the lesion in 3 dimensional space. Soft tissue lesions in lungs or livers deep in the body don't show up clearly enough on a conventional X-ray image to locate them with pinpoint accuracy, they need a CT scan to be seen clearly. Stereotactic localisation can't be done on a CT machine because all CT images are virtual slices reconstructed by a computer and are not available in real time, the position of the reconstructed slice is deep in the tunnel of the machine, and all slices are also at the same angle (90 degrees to the axis of the machine). Hence the need to use a crude manual measurement of distances and angles, the proceadure being repeated until a satisfactory result is obtained. 8-(

?

DG

Reply to
Derek Geldard

I was.

The radiologist said it was like playing 'Battleships'. I was innocent of that too :-)

What don't you understand?

Mary

Reply to
Mary Fisher

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