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operates. Very smooth. Very slick. And very sleazy.
The New York Times report included these excerpts from internal
company e-mails submitted as part of a wrongful death case set for trial
this month. The e-mails are dripping with greed and a callous disregard
for whether a surgeon was trained to use the robotic equipment or
whether the surgeries were too complex for the technology.
• Conversion factor. When a regional sales manager noted that area
surgeons had used robotic equipment only 5 times, well short of
Intuitive's quarterly quota of 36, he urged sales reps to persuade surgeons to convert upcoming cases to robotic ones. "Don't let proctoring or credentialing get in our way." In another e-mail, a sales rep
urged a Billings, Mont., hospital to relax its credentialing requirement,
saying that requiring surgeons to do 5 supervised operations using the
robot before going solo was "on the high side." Hospital officials
acquiesced, apparently not concerned with robotic surgery's steep
learning curve. "We will review and most likely will decrease the 5
down to 3."
• Scrub the schedule. A clinical sales director e-mailed the sales team
to "scrub" doctors' schedules and get procedures moved up by a few
days to make the quarterly goal and take down the commission. "Let's
bring it home!" she wrote. "Be sure you scrub all schedules, identify
cases on Thursday and Friday that can be moved up."
• Peer pressure. A clinical sales director wrote this love letter to his
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