Johnson & Johnson Hires Own Compensation Recall Company

When DePuy Orthopaedics and its parent company, Johnson & Johnson (J&J), initiated the hip replacement recall, it crafted a compensation program that would reimburse hip recipients for the “reasonable and customary” costs associated with another surgery. Thus, Johnson& Johnson employed Broadspire Services, a subsidiary of insurance agency Crawford & Crawford.

The New York Times, on December 27, 2011, published an article about the reimbursement regulations of DePuy, Johnson & Johnson and Broadspire. The article reports that “things were not going smoothly for everyone who has had accepted DePuy’s payment offer.”

With approximately 93,000 recipients worldwide, the ASR XL Acetabular System and the ASR Hip Resurfacing System were recalled after data revealed that the devices fail prematurely in one out of eight people who have them.

“It is a complete untruth that DePuy did not have reason to withdraw the ASR before now; we have been telling them since 2007, but they allowed it to be used on thousands of people,” says Dr. Stephen Graves, the director of the National Joint Replacement Registry in Australia.

“We believe we made the appropriate decision to recall at the appropriate time given the available information,” states DePuy spokeswoman, Mindy Tinsley.

Johnson & Johnson had pledged a total of $280 million in compensatory claims to the recalls, as of March 31, 2011. The company further guaranteed to “address reasonable and customary costs associated with testing and treatment.” The metal particles shed from metal-on-metal hip replacement implants may increase the amount of some metals in the blood, such as chromium and cobalt. This may cause metallosis (blood poisoning) and genotoxicity (genetic damage). Furthermore, tumors and cancer may also arise because of cobalt and chromium in the patient’s blood.

In May 2011, different engineers and medical experts created a registry tasked to track hip and knee implants, after the issuance of DePuy hip replacement recall.

” The goal is to track the more than 700,000 total hip and knee replacement surgeries that take place in the U.S. each year and, over time, record which implants failed prematurely, requiring revision surgery to fix the original operation,” David Lewallen said. He is the AJRRchairman and a professor of orthopedic surgery at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota.

The hip replacement recall positively urged the manufacturer to take an action on the need of the public for safe medical services and products. With the number of duly filed DePuy lawsuit increasing worldwide, DePuy should properly face the hip replacement problems encountered by its clients. It should circulate a wide range of information regarding malfunctioning hip replacement symptoms so that its patrons would be provided with due medical attention.

References:

• nytimes.com/2011/12/28/business/the-high-cost-of-failing-artificial-hips.html?_r=2&pagewanted=all

• medicinenet.com/total_hip_replacement/article.htm

• nytimes.com/2010/03/04/health/04metalhip.html