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and put on new scrubs. They walked into my office to show me they were wet, and the fluid went through the gown." Mr. Vezeau testified that surgeons also complained that the sleeves lit- erally fell off the gowns during procedures. According to the plaintiff's legal brief, in summer 2012, a K-C sales rep wrote to the home office: I "would highly encourage you to re-examine the sleeves." ... Is "there any way to make them stronger" because "they do pull apart pretty easily." According to the plaintiff's legal brief, K-C continued to test the gowns in the spring and summer of 2012, this time using another com- pany. The results were similar, with at least 3 tests resulting in seam failure. The gowns stayed on the market. A subsequent event got the attention of K-C executives. Cardinal Health, which distributed the MicroCool gown as well as its own AAMI Level 4 gown, the "Smartgown," claimed that the Cardinal gown was the "only breathable, fully impervious gown in the industry." K-C sued, and as the legal battle progressed, late in 2012, Cardinal sent several batches of MicroCool High Performance gowns to Intertek. Again, the gowns flunked the tests. In 2 of the tests of 32 gowns, more than half exhibited liquid or viral penetration. In 2 additional tests of 36 gowns each, more than half failed. Cardinal supplied the results to K-C, and 6 weeks later, according to a plaintiff's legal brief, the lawsuit settled. Keith Edgett, who was Kimberly-Clark's global director of surgical and infection prevention until October 2013, testified that "none of these results was surprising" to his team. "We had cost-optimized per- formance out of … K-C's products." Mr. Edgett did not return a call from Outpatient Surgery. At a subsequent meeting, K-C Healthcare President Joanne Bauer expressed frustration about the quality problems Cardinal had found and about the continuing quality problems across all product lines 2 6 • O U T PA T I E N T S U R G E R Y M A G A Z I N E • S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 6