24 Jun You Know You’ve Got “Medical Device Quality” When It’s Easier to Win the Lottery

SurgiLance’s complaint rate had averaged 0.00002 percent annually since fiscal year 2003

Quick, which do you think has better odds of occurring: Somebody winning a million dollars in the Powerball® lottery (by matching five white balls), or a customer having a complaint about a SurgiLance™ safety lancet?

Don’t think too hard, as the odds aren’t even all that close. Although the already slim chance for winning the million-dollar Powerball prize is only one in 5.1 million, it is are still considerably better than the one in 5.3 million chance of somebody having a problem with one of our safety needlestick devices.

With the recent announcement that MediPurpose has sold its billionth SurgiLance, it’s not hard to relate our fingerstick device’s outstanding quality rate to this monumental milestone.

As my colleague Adeline Yi mentioned in a blog last year, SurgiLance’s complaint rate had averaged 0.00002 percent annually since fiscal year 2003. Put another way, that’s barely more than 200 complaints for the millions (and now billion) of safety lancets we’ve sold.

Think about the countless products that you frequently purchase. It could be virtually anything: apples, sneakers, mobile phones, cars, etc. On the low end, you’ve owned a few of those items, and on the high end, you haven’t purchased anywhere near a million of them, much less a billion. But, regardless of the item, how satisfied have you consistently been? Have you never bought a bruised apple? A pair of uncomfortable sneakers that didn’t last long? A mobile phone that broke or didn’t have good reception? A car that was routinely in the repair shop?

Granted, a safety lancet isn’t the most complicated product. After all, it’s mostly just plastic (latex-free!), a spring and a sterile needle. But the device’s simplicity—and its reliability—should not be underestimated. From the design to the manufacturing to the packaging, a tremendous amount of research, testing and pride went into every step…and the same can be said for our other medical products: babyLance™ safety heelsticks and MediPlus™ Advanced Wound Care dressings.

You might say that with each year, SurgiLance continues to beat the odds. And, in the context that it’s a medical product designed to increase safety and decrease pain for its users, those numbers are hard to beat.