I'm calling Bullshit on Medtronic's Open Sourcing of a ventilator design | Hacker News Reader

I'm calling Bullshit on Medtronic's Open Sourcing of a ventilator design

twitter.com

73 pointsbhc27 comments

Not only are the files incomplete to actually go into production, they’ve picked a model where the components are not readily available on the open market in quantities large enough to have an impact corresponding to effort. IC4 is some variant of the ST10F27 (can’t make out the last digit from the low res pdf they’ve provided), and there are only a few thousand of all variants of that chip available online with quotes lead times of up to 30 weeks.

I was initially pleasantly surprised with this release but tweeted my disappointment pretty quickly. Even with a schematic it can take months to get the layout right and validated on a line, build and setup the test apparatus...

It looks like this family of ventilators is not new. It's not surprising that it uses ICs that are older and harder to source because there was never a need to upgrade them. Maybe this is on us, the tech industry, for doing a lousy job at supporting old technology and being so eager to move to the next version.

Medtronic should not be making such a big fuzz on media about "opening up design/open sourcing" their entry level ventilators consciously knowing their true intent was never meant to help others to mass produce their ventilators due to concealing mechanical drawings, software, and BOMs and no MCU for the model to support mass production.

If you know there is never a chance someone could mass produce your machine to threat your revenue, it's disingenuous at best to claim open sourcing your 15 year old modal could help for other to mass produce ventilators in the next few days or weeks (NOT YEARS!!!).

It just doesn't help in short time and in long term it doesn't matter because we need the ventilators NOW!

Exactly.

The press reads as if anyone with access to a factory capable of manufacturing electrical systems with custom enclosures could pull the files, place some orders, and start pumping units out as soon as their tooling was ready.

[Follow up]. They just released gerbers, BOMs, and other documents. Some key parts are still unavailable in quantity, unfortunately.

More dirt of Medtronic:

- In May 2018, Medtronic was ranked as the largest corporate tax inversion in history. [1]

- Medtronic weaseled their way out of creating affordable ventilators for the US government.[2]

[1] https://www.theglobeandmail.com/globe-investor/investment-id...

[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/29/business/coronavirus-us-v...

Those two facts interleave in a weird way. Covidien bought the company the US government contracted to build affordable ventalators in 2012. Medtronic bought Covidien in 2015 as a tax inversion. So Medtronic didn't really kill the project. Also, what was the DOJ doing when Covidien bought Newport? If the project was going as well as the NYT suggests, why didn't the justice department get more involved? Granted, hindsight, and all.

Nationalize this IP and require the IP to be open source. Figure out the payments afterwards.

Why not nationalize the IP from all the ventilator manufacturers and make a best of breed version. But we would have to get it into mass production in a month to be of significant benefit.

You answered your own question. We've already tried to make our own tests and failed, thereby significantly delaying our response. It's likely that we would fail to integrate the IP successfully on the first try too. Also what is best-in-breed? At this point, for maximum community benefit, it seems like we need cheap and fast to produce, not highest quality.

numbers more important than best of breed, imo

The problem is ramping up manufacturing and supply chains, not designing a better ventilator. Even if it were, a best-of-breed would be incrementally better at best, but at the cost of months if not years. Efforts are actually going the other direction, a MVP ventalator, because of manufacturing and supply chains.

The US can do that easily. 28 USC 1498.

Medtronic's slogan ought to be 'yesterday's tech for tomorrows prices'.

I wonder what a TI-89 sells for these days.

Are you referring to "calculators approved for standardized tests"?

$100 for a Ti-84 is definitely a price anomaly.

I think this is most things that use tech that aren't tech companies. Read up on airline reservation systems and the IRS's computer system--they're ancient. Outside of tech, I think there's a notion that these are one-off projects (design and build X) and not large upfront investments that need continuous work to still be maintainable.

Even when you bring tech into your personal life, remember that it's one more thing you need to patch, backup, replace, etc.

This looks like the kind of documentation that all end users would get. Enough to do PM maybe, enough to operate it, enough to satisfy regulatory requirements (eg: prove how the tech was tested, what those procedures were, controls on the docs, etc).

There is no way to manufacture one from this set of docs.

I wonder if there is a project where a cheaper hospital for a third world country can be created by using tech which is old but not covered under current IP (expired patents).

I mean i believe stuff like MRI cannot be manufactured by non large manufacturers but what about all other machines.

My guess is the bottleneck would be no one except current manufacturers make it at scale to do it cheap enough. It would be a great project to have though.

When i look at the prices of certain devices it just boggles my mind. It is crazier when one realizes that some of these are not even patent protected.

Most developing countries are free to ignore intellectual property laws.

Anecdotal story: Once upon a time Software piracy was rampant in India. However in my city a coalition of software cos joined hand with local law enforcement and did unscheduled raids on facilities like some educational institutions suspected of piracy. It turned out in one place money authorized for software licenses were absorbed by the procurement dept (1 person) and he installed pirated software instead.

I think you may be misapprehending the implication HN user "kick" may be making.

I think "kick" means that there are developing nations that don't care about IP law. The authorities in these nations are not going to help anyone arrest anyone. In fact, in some developing nations, the authorities may actually be the ones infringing the IP.

I know for a fact this is the case in Cuba.

Of course Cuba's doctors are world renown, but just how do you think their health system gets those kinds of world leading medical outcomes under a comprehensive blockade for over 60 years with no access to medications or healthcare technology? It's not only due to Cuban doctors inventing novel procedures and medications. (Which is admirable). It's also due in no small part to the Cuban state flagrantly ignoring IP. And Cuban doctors will infringe IP without hesitation if they think it will help their patients. So when Cuban doctors show up in West Africa to contain Ebola, or in East Africa for SARS, or in Italy for Coronavirus, or etc etc etc, the host nations likely don't ask a whole lot of questions about whether or not certain equipment or medications they have with them infringe patents.

Please don't misunderstand, I don't believe what the Cuban medical community does is wrong at all. They've got a patient, and they see themselves as pure doctors and not beholden to commercial interests where patient safety is concerned. Good on them. I'm just pointing out that "kick" is right, there are a lot of developing nations out there who simply ignore IP. Cuba is just one of the more famous examples.

But i think what is going to happen is that in the reverse globalization process that is possibly going on, countries will pressurize other countries to safeguard their IP and enforce it in more serious ways.

I really wish healthcare gets decoupled from typical capitalism (money at all costs) to more regulated version (10% margin over 10 year, IP sharing ) or something like that over the next few years or decades. I guess mistrust between countries means it won't happen.

I'm almost ready to publish something like that, finishing up the documentation tonight hopefully.

for ventilators or in general ?

Sounds eerily similar to a key plot point in Walkaway [1]. Except there it was not the 3rd world, but people walking away from 1st (default) world. The IP was originally public domain/govt. funded in the book though (you could make an argument that a lot of new research patents have govt. funding in there somewhere, depending on how basic you want to go).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walkaway_(Doctorow_novel)

The Airon ventilator Ford is teaming up on is only produced thrice daily. Being mechanical only it should be easier to ramp up production and testing with less need for externally sourced parts.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com