Less than 10 percent of retrievable IVC filters removed from patients

MASSDEVICE ON CALL — Less than 10 percent of retrievable inferior vena cava filters were removed from patients released from Boston Medical Center even though filter placement was no longer required at discharge.

Of the 679 patients who had received a retrievable IVC filter at Boston Medical Center since 2006 only 9 percent had the IVC filter successfully removed.

“The retrievable filters can be left in permanently, although I would say that the majority of these patients only had a temporary reason why they couldn’t be anticoagulated, and yet the filter remained in place after they were sent home,” Boston Medical Center’s Shayna Sarosiek told TheHeart.org. “Roughly 25 percent of all of these patients were fully anticoagulated before they left the hospital, which means the filter should have come out.”

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One patient had and IVC filter removed after it had been in place for five years, according to the news site.

Roughly half of the filters at Boston Medical Center were implanted for anticoagulation therapy after trauma, blunt trauma, car accidents and falls. Sarosiek said that lack of follow-up was the main reason these retrievable filters aren’t removed from patients.

"The filters are placed by five different services within the hospital, but there’s not one assigned group of providers that follow up with these patients," Sarosiek told the news site. "They’re just kind of lost in the wind. A lot of the filters are placed by the trauma surgeons initially when the patient comes for trauma, and then the patients are followed by primary care or some other service, so they’re not followed up properly."

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