Abbott escapes payer ’ s lawsuit over St. Jude Medical CRM batteries

Abbott (NYSE:ABT) this week escaped a purported class action lawsuit brought by a third-party payer over defective batteries used in subsidiary St. Jude Medical‘s cardiac rhythm management devices. Plaintiff ASEA/AFSCME Local 52 Health Benefits Trust brought the suit last September on behalf of third-party payers, alleging in the U.S. District Court for Northern Illinois that Abbott and St. Jude concealed the battery problems from the public and the FDA. Little Canada, Minn.-based St. Jude warned about a premature depletion issue with the batteries in October 2016, five years after its battery supplier first reported the issue, according to court documents. The company said the cause of the problem could not be determined, despite receiving 42 product reports between 2011 and 2014, according to the documents. After a patient’s death was linked to battery depletion in 2014, It was only after Abbott and St. Jude entered the due-diligence phase of their eventual merger and consummated the deal that the issue was investigated in earnest, discovering that the lithium-based batteries could form “lithium clusters” during high-voltage charging that could cause a short-circuit and deplete the battery within a day to a few weeks. The company said it received reports of 841 premature battery depletions out of the 398,470 Fortify, Fortify Assura, Quadra Assura, Quadra Assura MP, Unify, Unify Assura and Unify Quadra devices it’s sold worldwide (roughly 0.21%)...
Source: Mass Device - Category: Medical Devices Authors: Tags: Cardiovascular Legal News Abbott stjudemedical Source Type: news