Early in the crisis, the Right to Repair campaign came into its own, as hospitals - all of us! - found themselves in the same position as farmers (R2R’s staunchest advocates): isolated, far from parts and service, with urgent needs that could not wait.
Right from the start, the folks at Ifixit were on the case, putting out an open call for the repair and service manuals that hospital techs have long squirreled away and traded in secret for fear of reprisals from manufacturers:
That, after all, is medtech’s dirty secret: despite manufacturers’ claims that their products can’t be safely serviced without their consent (and without paying them), hospitals have ALWAYS fixed their own gear, because the alternative is letting people die.
It was manufacturers who were endangering patients, by making it harder for technicians laboring under time-pressure to save human lives to get the information they needed. No wonder state officials started demanding respirator repair guides.
Hospital technicians answered Ifixit’s call for repair manuals, opening up their secret hard-drives and inundating the service with more manuals than they could handle, so they enlisted The Maintainers and the American Library Association to help organize them.
Today, Ifixit’s Medical Device Repair portal is open and thriving, with manuals for repairing a vast array of medical equipment, during the pandemic and beyond.
They’re reversing the trend of deadly information hoarding. As Paul Kelley of Fremont’s Washington Hospital told Wired’s Lauren Goode: “We can do less and less work on equipment. We’re getting less and less documentation. Training is getting harder, and parts are getting scarcer.”
Predictably, the medtech lobbyists at Medical Imaging and Technology Alliance is warning that this will put people in danger - I suppose their answer is that if an authorized technician isn’t available, we should ensure patient safety by letting them die.
