They are a little-known presence in many operating rooms, offering technical expertise to surgeons installing new knees, implanting cardiac defibrillators or performing delicate spine surgery.
Often called device reps — or by the more cumbersome and less transparent moniker “health-care industry representatives” — these salespeople are employed by the companies that make medical devices: Stryker, Johnson & Johnson and Medtronic, to name a few. Their presence in the OR, particularly common in orthopedics and neurosurgery, is part of the equipment packages that hospitals typically buy.
Many “people who don’t work in health care don’t realize that industry reps are sometimes in the OR,” said Josephine Wergin, a risk management analyst for the ECRI Institute, a Pennsylvania nonprofit that conducts research on medical subjects for the health-care industry. “A lot of times they are the real experts on their products.”
Unlike rotating teams of nurses and surgical techs, reps are a consistent presence, experts say, often functioning as uber-assistants to surgeons with whom they cultivate close relationships and upon whom their six-figure salaries depend.
Although they don’t scrub in, reps are expected to be intimately familiar with the equipment they sell, making sure it is at the ready for the surgeon and poised to answer technical questions.
But how much influence do reps wield, how necessary and costly are their services and does their presence in the OR, which may not be disclosed to patients, raise ethical questions about informed consent? A string of court cases has raised questions about their involvement in surgeries that went awry, dating back to the late 1970s when a New York sales manager who had not graduated from high school tried for three hours to fix a prosthetic hip while one of the surgeons is said to have left the OR.
Despite their role, device reps have received little scrutiny, in sharp contrast to drug salespeople, whose role has been the subject of considerable research.
“There’s so little public awareness of this,” said Adriane Fugh-Berman, an associate professor of pharmacology at the Georgetown University School of Medicine and director of PharmedOut, a project that focuses on prescribing and drug-marketing practices. Fugh-Berman is the co-author of a recent study that raises questions about whether surgeons rely too heavily on reps for technical expertise and assistance, to the potential detriment of patients.
But the cost of medical devices, an industry with about $150 billion in annual U.S. sales, combined with concerns about conflicts of interest by doctors who must report industry payments as part of the Affordable Care Act, has resulted in increased scrutiny, as hospitals from Savannah to Stanford seek to standardize and circumscribe the activities of device salespeople.
I say fine. Let the hospital’s and their staff be responsible like they used to. Unfortunately the techs have come to rely on the reps too much. The OR administrators don’t want to pay the good techs overtime to learn the systems even though they want to.
Also the rep now pays to be in the operating room. Crazy.
We are there to support the staff, surgeon and more importantly the patient !