KFF Health News won the 2023 George Polk Award for Medical Journalism for its year-long investigation, in collaboration with CBS News, into the failure of FDA-approved medical devices that were suspected of contributing to thousands of injuries and patient deaths.
Here’s an excerpt from one of the articles in that award-winning series:
Thousands Got Exactech Knee or Hip Replacements. Then, Patients Say, the Parts Began to Fail.
By Fred Schulte, October 10, 2023
You can read the full article here.
Ron Irby expected the artificial knee implanted in his right leg in September 2018 would last two decades — perhaps longer.
Yet in just three years, the Optetrak implant, manufactured by Exactech in Gainesville, Florida, had worn out and had to be replaced — a painful and debilitating operation.
“The surgery was a huge debt of pain paid over months,” said Irby, 71, a Gainesville resident and retired medical technologist with the Department of Veterans Affairs.
Irby is one of more than 1,100 patients suing Exactech after it began recalling artificial knees, hips, and ankles, starting in August 2021. A letter Exactech sent to surgeons blamed a packaging defect dating back as far as 2004 for possibly causing the plastic in a knee component to wear out prematurely in about 140,000 implants. Many patients argue in hundreds of lawsuits that they have suffered through, or could soon face, challenging and risky operations to replace defective implants that failed.
Although Exactech does not offer an express warranty on its products, the company stresses the durability of its implants in advertising, even suggesting they likely will outlive their human recipients.
Exactech, which grew over three decades from a mom-and-pop device manufacturer into a global entity that sold for $737 million in 2018, declined comment, citing the “ongoing litigation,” said company spokesperson Tom Johnson.
In court filings, Exactech has argued that its products are not defective and have “an excellent history.”
A KFF Health News review of thousands of pages of court filings in patient lawsuits, a pending whistleblower lawsuit, and other government records shows that the company is being accused of downplaying or concealing evidence of product failures from patients and federal regulators for years. In hundreds of instances, according to government records, the company took years to report adverse events to a federal database that tracks device failures.
In his suit, Irby alleges that Exactech “knew or should have known” that the Optetrak “had an unacceptable failure and complication rate.” He said Exactech used packaging materials of “an inferior grade or quality.”
“I think they were cutting corners to improve their bottom line,” Irby told KFF Health News.
Exactech denied the allegations in a legal filing in Irby’s suit, in which it described the Optetrak device as “safe and effective.”
Surgeon William “Bill” Petty chaired the orthopedics department at the University of Florida in Gainesville, when he, his wife, Betty, and Gary Miller, a biomedical engineer and fellow faculty member, formed Exactech in November 1985. The Pettys served in corporate roles until retiring in early 2020. Their first hire was their son David in 1988, who remains on Exactech’s board of directors.
Exactech’s fortunes started to take off in 1994, when it inked a major deal to license and market the Optetrak knee implant based on designs by surgeons and engineers at the prestigious Hospital for Special Surgery in New York City. That alliance won Exactech instant credibility in the fiercely competitive device industry.
So did its pedigree as a “surgeon-focused” business with a family-run vibe, small enough that surgeons considering its wares could meet the owners and tour its Florida plant.
Building on that goodwill, Exactech’s sales shot past $124 million in 2007, about half generated by the Optetrak knee system.
“It’s not just a road we’re on, it’s a trail we’re blazing,” the company boasted in sales literature aimed at surgeons.
Exactech’s corporate confidence belies years of warnings and doubts about the durability of the Optetrak, according to whistleblowers — one whistleblower called it an “open secret” inside the company. Notably, there were concerns about the fragility of a finned tibial tray, one of the four pieces of the knee replacement that fits into the shin bone, according to the whistleblower lawsuit.
For starters, several surgeons complained that the knee implants loosened prematurely, causing patients pain and limiting their ability to move around, court records allege.
While 95% of artificial knees should last at least a decade, surgeons had to pull out and replace many Optetrak components — a complex operation known as revision surgery — much sooner, according to allegations in patient lawsuits.
Christopher Hutchins, a Connecticut orthopedic surgeon who relied on the Optetrak finned devices for more than 350 knee surgeries, said in a court deposition that some loosened in as little as two to three years. He called that “awfully premature” and “extraordinary.”
Hutchins vented his frustrations in a brief meeting with Exactech co-founder Bill Petty at a Rhode Island hospital in either 2006 or 2007, according to his deposition. Petty told him at the meeting he “realized that it was a problem” with the device, according to Hutchins.
“I was somewhat struck that if they knew there was a problem, why it wasn’t being addressed and why the product wasn’t being pulled from the market,” Hutchins testified in the November 2021 deposition.
“There was no disclosure or transparency.”
Exactech discussed the problems in an internal memo that said between 2006 and 2009 the company “began to get some negative feedback” about the Optetrak “that was at times confounding and difficult to process,” court records show.
The discouraging reports ranged from complaints of early revisions from at least 10 U.S. surgeons and surgery practices in several of the more than 30 countries where Exactech sold the implant, court records show.
The results did little to dim Exactech’s prospects. From 1994 through April 2022, Exactech sold 58,763 Optetrak devices with finned trays for use by 514 surgeons nationwide, according to an affidavit by a company official.
Many lawsuits argue that instead of warning patients and surgeons about the loosening problem, Exactech replaced the finned tray component in its newest products, a strategy device industry critics refer to as a “silent recall.” Exactech denies that and said in a court filing that design changes it made were part of a “natural evolution” of the Optetrak.
Even as Exactech rolled out newer generations of the Optetrak, the company faced lawsuits and other criticism alleging it had failed to come clean about unusually high surgical revision rates.
The Food and Drug Administration runs a massive, public, searchable databank called MAUDE to warn the public of dangers linked to medical devices and drugs.
Manufacturers must advise the FDA when they learn their device may have caused or contributed to a death or serious injury, or malfunctioned in a way that might recur and cause harm.Those reports must be submitted within 30 days unless a special exemption is granted.
But court and government records show that reports of adverse reactions tied to Exactech’s implant sometimes took years to show up in the government database — if they were reported at all.
Exactech failed to advise the FDA of dozens of Optetrak early revision complaints lodged by orthopedic surgeons Moody and Hutchins, a company representative acknowledged in a court filing.
KFF Health News downloaded the FDA data and found about 400 examples in which Exactech reported adverse events to the MAUDE database two years or more after learning of them.
FDA inspectors who combed through Exactech’s internal files in 2017 cited the company for failing to undertake an “adequate investigation” of complaints, according to FDA records cited in court filings.
In court filings, Exactech steadfastly denied Optetrak has any defects. Instead, it blamed the loosening problem on surgeons, saying they had failed to cement the knee implants into place correctly or misaligned them.
The company said it had no obligation to report poor outcomes tied to mistakes by surgeons — even though the FDA requires companies to report injuries involving “user error.” In 2022, a federal judge in the whistleblower case, in denying a motion to dismiss, found that Exactech was “hard-pressed” to claim it was not obligated to report the adverse events.
The three whistleblowers are accusing Exactech of fraud for allegedly selling defective products to Medicare and other federal health care programs. The case is pending in federal court in Alabama and Exactech has denied any wrongdoing.
Americans trust the FDA to make sure medical devices are safe and to act swiftly if problems arise. But a yearlong investigation by KFF Health News revealed that a series of FDA-cleared products, both implanted in the human body and used to treat chronic diseases, have been suspected of contributing to thousands of injuries and patient deaths. Read more here.