My clients case involves the safety of a medial device. Can you direct me to where I might find relevant information about a particular medical device and whether it was known to have had problems similar to my client's case?

A:

Another trial tip from Steve Lombardi. Civil trial practice is challenging and direction that opens informational doors can be something well worth listening too.

Let's say you've got a case involving medical devices and it's a contraption you've never seen or heard about. What can you do to become educated about it and about how it has tested in the field of commerce - in this case the medical community. Check out the ECRI Institute's Medical Device Safety Reports database.

Welcome to ECRI Institute's Medical Device Safety Reports (MDSR) database. MDSR is a repository of medical device incident and hazard information independently investigated by ECRI Institute, a nonprofit health research agency. MDSR is not an alerting service, but a periodically updated review of the types of problems that have occurred with medical devices and lessons learned over the past three decades. It focuses on the steps that medical device users can take to prevent or reduce medical device risks to patient care and healthcare worker safety. You can search through MDSR by using either the criteria provided in the pick lists or by using the free text search box below. For current alerts and a historical database see our Health Devices Alerts database.

I was curious about surgical suite fires being caused by laser type equipment. So I went to the site and searched for "fire". The search engine located 48 reports having to do with fires. This is a very useful site for anyone who is curious about medical devices and safety.

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