Lance Armstrong’s confession and the Te’o girlfriend hoax are just the latest in a long line of public revelations reminding us that some things are not all they’re cracked up to be – and in fact may be the polar opposite of what we thought they were. Long-running symbols of success, such as Armstrong or the Penn State football dynasty, are exposed as charlatans or as such masters of the cover-up it would make Nixon blush. John Edwards, Arnold Schwarzenegger … who can count the number of politicians touting family values who have betrayed their own families?
The medical device industry, which exists to help people heal, is not immune to that now-famous question asked about most scandals: what did they know and when did they know it? Such is the case concerning Johnson & Johnson subsidiary DePuy Orthopaedics, which, court documents suggest, knew as far back as 2008 that its metal-on-metal ASR hip implants might have high failure rates – a year before beginning to phase out the product line and two years before announcing a recall in August 2010.
It must be one of the most difficult situations for a device company to endure – to learn that a product you spent years and millions of dollars to develop is doing more harm than good, to try to determine whether this is due to operator error, suboptimal training or a flaw in design or manufacturing. Or whether the entire premise of how the product is supposed to work is flawed and it needs to be shut down, at great loss to the company. There must be a period where, hope against hope, it’s believed there is a way to save the business and also – very important for brand integrity – save face. And so the truth is not shared right away. There are meetings. Debates. Analyses. A search for the guilty. Hirings and firings. And, always, the burning question: what do we do?
Meanwhile, Rome burns. If there is one thing I’ve learned in the 30 years I’ve been interviewing physicians, nurses, laboratorians, technologists, scientists, CEOs, heads of R&D, salespeople and patients – from hospital to home to hospice – it’s that people just want to be told the truth. We dearly want things we can believe in but have so often had our faith shaken by individuals or institutions who betrayed our trust. (I well remember how proud it made my younger son to wear a LIVESTRONG wristband when he was in middle school.) As one lab director said to me several years ago, "Tell these companies to tell us what’s wrong with their product, too. Just be honest with us. We’re going to find out anyway."
In other words, your customers can handle the truth. The question is, can you?