Importance of Calibrated Devices for the Health Industry

With a market size of around $140 billion, the US medical device market remained the largest in the world in 2015, representing about 40% of the global medical device market, according to Select USA. It was further published that the exceeding $44 billion, medical devices were one of the key US exports.

It is the investment of a higher percentage of yearly revenues into product innovations and increased R&D spending leading to high technology products by medical device companies that have positioned America at the top of the global medical device market.

According to Today’s Medical Development, of all the exported medical devices,29%were surgical & medical instruments, 22%were surgical appliances & supplies, 14% were electro-medical & electro-therapeutic apparatus and 3% were dental equipment & supplies in 2015. Other than leading the world in the production of medical devices, the US also led in the consumption of such devices across the globe.

Drawbacks of US Medical Devices

According to US News, medical errors involving medicines, surgery, diagnosis, home treatment, equipment, or lab reports are the third leading cause of deaths that could have been prevented in the US. The article further stated that poorly coordinated care and system-wide failings are becoming the major reason for most such deaths.

Poor measurements in medical services while diagnosing illnesses, monitoring patients and delivering treatments are also a major cause of people not recovering from their illness within the expected time frame. In fact, failure to ensure appropriate measurements, which leads to an incorrect diagnosis of disease, can have diverse effects, which in most situations cannot be reverted. This occurs due to errors in the medical equipment, which then show the test results value to be below or above the true value, causing over-detection or under-detection of a disease.

Disadvantages of Non-Calibrated Equipment

You might be surprised to learn how much the value can alter when testing a patient’s sample with uncalibrated equipment, such as sphygmomanometers used for measuring blood pressure, clinical thermometers for body temperature, weighing scales for body weight, spirometers for respiratory diseases, syringes and more.

This then changes the course of treatment, with the risk of the patient being under- or overdosed, as doctors majorly rely on clinical results obtained from the laboratory to set a treatment schedule for their patients. This could lead to a patient suffering from a temporary or permanent disability, and, in many scenarios, even death, in case the disease is not correctly detected.

For a patient, use of uncalibrated equipment for the diagnosis of his health condition can even mean huge but avoidable expenses, with the follow-up treatment being extended longer than would otherwise be required, leading to high medical bills and prescription drugs charges.

Medical Devices Need to Be Calibrated

A person visits a doctor in the hope of getting well soon. So, it would be shameful if the person’s life is put at risk due to hospitals and medical services being negligent toward the calibration of medical devices.

Calibration or the systematic and periodic checking of test and measuring instruments used in medical services is important since it is the best method to ensure their accuracy. After calibration, the readings from the instrument will become more consistent, providing accurate measurement and the test results will reflect the true value as closely as possible.

According to experts at PCS Precision Calibration Systems, when a medical facility consults a calibration service provider, it should ensure that all its professional technicians are trained to calibrate the instruments as per the ISO 17025, ISO 8655 and CLIA regulations. This way, one can rest assured of the equipment being calibrated accurately.