Ellison Pierce and Bill New – who had more impact?

Up to the 1960s and 1980s, Anesthesia deaths occurred 1/10,000 procedures. In 1972, Jeffrey Cooper observed anesthesiologists and observed lack of standardization in the machine which administered anesthetics and then using critical incident analysis studied 359 different errors and published a paper known as “Prevent Anesthesia Mishaps: A study of human factors” in 1978. It took until 1982 when Ellison Piece was elected VP of the ASA that he established a committee on patient safety and in collaboration with Cooper persuaded the FDA to produced a checklist and patient safety videos to be distributed through pharma companies and then started an ongoing international symposium on anesthesia patient safety. He then established the Anesthesia Patient Safety Foundation with a newsletter, funds and channeling grants for use in patient safety research.

This led to redesign of machines, monitoring devices and dropping error rates with 139 papers published by 1995. This launched the field of Patient Safety and anesthesia-related errors had dropped to 1/200,000 cases.

It is very interesting to couple this development with a fairly concurrent development in the traditional entrepreneur model in the development of the pulse oximeter by Bill New

The following is excerpted from an article by Pole, Y. “Evolution of the pulse oximeter” International Congress Series 1242 (2002) 137– 144

Credit for the present enormous interest in pulse oximetry belongs to the anesthesiologists William New and Mark Yelderman of Stanford University Medical School. New recognized the potential importance of and market for a convenient, accurate oximeter in the operating room and all other hospital and clinic sites where patients are sedated, anesthetized, unconscious, comatose, paralyzed, or in some way limited in their ability to regulate their own O₂ supply. New, with engineer Jack Lloyd, founded Nellcor, which began the mass manufacture of the Nellcor pulse oximeters. The Nellcor pulse oximeter was evaluated by Yelderman and New, the manufacturers in 1983 [2. M. Yelderman and W. New, Jr., Evaluation of pulse-oximetry. Anesthesiology 59 (1983), pp. 349–352. View Record in Scopus | Cited By in Scopus (77)2].

After an initial period of scepticism, as of 1988, the Association of Anaesthetists of Great Britain and Ireland recognized the pulse oximeter as their standard for intraoperative monitoring, and 2 years later, as of 1990, the American Society of Anesthesiologists recognized it as their standard for intraoperative monitoring.

By 1993, there were about 40 companies making and selling pulse oximeters, and over 750 books, reviews, and papers concerning pulse oximetry were published. Nellcor was founded in 1981 and sold in 1995 for $2 billion.

Which of these is a more powerful impact for the social good? According to a meta-analysis by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality which monitors healthcare quality, the available studies do not automatically attribute an improvement in outcomes to better monitoring. In fact, in a multicenter, randomized, controlled trial of 20,802 surgical patients, Moller et al studied the impact of perioperative pulse oximetry on patient outcome. Despite the large sample, the authors were unable to show a difference in in-hospital mortality or postoperative complications. During anesthesia and in the post-anesthesia care unit (PACU), more episodes of hypoxemia and myocardial ischemia were detected in patients monitored with pulse oximetry.

http://www.ahrq.gov/clinic/ptsafety/chap24.htm

Moller JT, Johannessen NW, Espersen K, Ravlo O, Pedersen BD, Jensen PF, et al. Randomized evaluation of pulse oximetry in 20,802 patients: II. Perioperative events and postoperative complications. Anesthesiology 1993;78:445-453.