How do your surgeons get trained to work with new medical implants? Once they're out of residency, they may depend on professional societies or vendor training programs that aren't consistently regulated for quality and effectiveness. And vendor-sponsored programs may create a conflict of interest by tying free training to purchase of their implants. The federal government has started collecting data on cardiac implants, comparing implant specialists with general cardiac surgeons who completed some sort of training on specific devices.
For more analysis on the issue, especially as it pertains to defibrillator implants:
- read this article in The New York Times