Abbott Addresses Life-Threatening Flaw In a Half-Million Pacemakers

lod123 shares a report from Threatpost: Nearly a half-million pacemakers are up for a firmware update to address potentially life-threatening vulnerabilities. Abbott (formerly St. Jude Medical) has released another upgrade to the firmware installed on certain implantable cardioverter defibrillator (ICD) or cardiac resynchronization therapy defibrillator (CRT-D) devices -- a.k.a., pacemakers. About 465,000 patients are affected. The update will strengthen the devices' protection against unauthorized access, as the provider said in a statement on its website: "It is intended to prevent anyone other than your doctor from changing your device settings." The update comes after 2016 claims by researchers that the then-St. Jude's cardiac implant ecosystem was rife with cybersecurity flaws that could result in "catastrophic results."

Let's $2000 for the doctor to install it + softwar

[Joe_Dragon]

Let's $2000 for the doctor to install it + software fees + office fees.

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[Joe_Dragon]

Our 1989 epic billing system running mumps is very limmted

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[LagFlag]

Put your money where your mouth is... how many RVUs will the physician earn doing this procedure? My guess is 2-3 at most, if he/she is there in person. At $70 per RVU, we're looking at about $200. This includes overhead of maintaining an office, nursing staff, clerical staff, etc, if he/she is one of the increasingly rare independent practice physicians

Most physicians I know spend a lot of time doing activities for which they earn nothing... especially email and phone calls,

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[MMC Monster]

I am a cardiologist.

This is more of a pain than it's worth. Calling patients to tell them they have to come in early, answering questions over phone or email regarding it, wasted time in the over-filled pacer clinics to squeeze these patients in.

I didn't look into the wRVU amount, but I'd be shocked if it was as high as 2 wRVUs for this.

(I'm an employed doc. I make enough wRVUs that I max out my bonus. I care more about patient health and satisfaction than a couple bucks.)

Re: Let's $2000 for the doctor to install it + sof

[LagFlag]

I only wished to establish an upper bound, based on CPT coding guidelines published by pacemaker/AICD companies.

As my Google and Facebook neighbors buy million dollar homes, I grow tired of insinuations that physicians are over-compensated.

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[sjames]

I would think near field is a better choice. Although minor, would you want to have surgery every time there's an update?

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[sjames]

It makes a lot more sense to use near field, That way, you can at the same time make sure an ER doctor can readily access your device in an emergency but your angry at the world neighbor can't kill you from his recliner.

bah!

[ruddk]

Not worried, it has been working flawl fT%ggg

Do Lighning Strikes affect these devices?

[Streetlight]

An earlier /. post noted that apparently lightning strikes can cause brain implants to stop working and I asked there if they also affected heart pacemakers to stop working. What about these devices?

Rewarding Spammers

[Luthair]

Is Slashdot really going to continue to reward blatent spammers like lod123 and threatpost. Another account they used previously was msm1267 [slashdot.org]