Bad medical product endings
Of all the sectors in product development where you want reliability, few are more critical than the medical sector. Here the product experience needs to be solid, reliable and of course, if its going to end, it better be planned. Surprisingly even here the end is not as thought through as you might think.
The medical industry is massive, growing, and very innovative. According Statista, it is projected to reach US$570.70bn in 2023. Of which the largest market is Medical Devices with a projected market volume of US$471.80bn in 2023. And R&D in that sector in 2024 projected to be $44 billion. 1The medical start-up sector is also pretty busy according to an analysis by Rock Health, 2 in the first six months of 2023, U.S. digital health startups raised $6.1 billion across 244 deals, with an average deal size of $24.8 million. 3
Although there is plenty of interest in starting new business, developing new products, sometimes attention is not paid to what happens if it stops. Unlike many other consumer products a bad ending in medical products can be more than an inconvenience.
Blindingly bad
Terry Byland became the first person to receive two eye implants from a start-up called Second Sight Medical products. The company had been developing a new technology, based on neural implants to provide sight to blind people. They had nearly 350 customers around the world, but, in 2019, Second Sight discontinued its retinal implants and nearly went bust the following year. Leaving its customers in limbo without any support. The systems embedded in their heads didn’t stop then, but there was no support or updates to the software.4 According to an article in Spectrum.ieee.org, Second Sight didn’t inform anyone of the company’s collapse. “No letter, email, or telephone call,” said one of their patient. Even clinicians were taken by surprise by Second Sight’s collapse. “It’s not something that we talked to any of the patients about, because I don’t think it crossed any of our minds”
What a headache
Meanwhile, another innovative company at a similar time was pioneering in a different medical area. Markus Möllmann-Bohle gets cluster headaches. They are rare, but extraordinarily painful. People who get them are typically affected for life. Treatment options are very limited. For Markus the condition eventually became chronic.
One potential solution was a product by the start-up Autonomic Technologies (known as ATI) in San Francisco, California. Their device had passed a series of placebo-controlled clinical trials with flying colours. It changed Markus’s life. He was free again.
The magazine Nature ran an article about the product. They said “by the end of 2019, ATI had collapsed. The company’s closure left Markus and more than 700 other people alone with a complex implanted medical device. People using the stimulator and their physicians could no longer access the proprietary software needed to recalibrate the device and maintain its effectiveness. 5
Stranded sitting
It is not just highly complex embedded medical products that are venerable. Even the simplest of potential hazards like a power cut can bring about critical endings for patients. A 2023 broadcast by local TV news company KUTV, interviewed Kent Rich who was trapped in a medical chair because it stopped working due to a power cut. He couldn’t call for help because the wifi phone he uses also stopped working. Both seem simple and expected scenarios that should have been considered, yet even here a bad ending is not planned for.6
List of ended medical products
Who keeps track of these? In the US, the FDA does many of the approvals for medical products, and they also keep track of the bad endings. The Manufacturer and User Facility Device Experience, or MAUDE is7 a list of products that should stop being used according to the FDA. It makes interesting readying, from simple face masks, to more complex products.
Product, service or digital product endings vary in impact. Some of them show little impact on the consumer directly, yet might show up months later as litter in a far away country. Other products have a more immediate impact on the consumer. Sometimes that can be life changing.
1 https://www.statista.com/outlook/hmo/medical-technology/worldwide#global-comparison
4 https://spectrum.ieee.org/bionic-eye-obsolete
5 https://www.nature.com/immersive/d41586-022-03810-5/index.html
6 https://youtu.be/MS4eh6JGzRo
7 https://www.fda.gov/medical-devices/safety-communications/2022-safety-communications
