Cardiologists at Isala Hospital forced patients to get pacemakers, ICD implants: report

At least four patients at the Isala Hospital in Zwolle said that cardiologists forced them to get a pacemaker or implantable defibrillator (ICD). The patients contacted NRC after publications about an ongoing corruption investigation into five Zwolle cardiologists and a German heart equipment manufacturer. One had to have her ICD removed for medical reasons.

The Isala Hospital acknowledged to NRC that the patients’ treatment “clearly did not” meet the standards. “A patient should never feel pressure to choose a particular treatment. We can therefore imagine that these patients look back on their experiences with regret,” the hospital said.

The Dutch healthcare regulator Zorginstituut Nederland recently warned that Dutch cardiologists too often implant ICDs without the device improving patients’ chance of survival. It instructed cardiologists to be more hesitant to implant ICDs and to inform patients better about the risks involved.

Isala places the largest number of ICDs of all Dutch hospitals, also in relation to the size of the patient population, according to NRC. The hospital previously looked into the reason for this but only concluded that the Zwolle doctors operated within European rules.

One of the patients the newspaper spoke to said that Zwolle doctors insisted he gets a pacemaker at a clinic in Indonesia. After the implant, he never received a call for a checkup. Isala cardiologists have worked at the Cinere clinic in Jakarta for at least 20 years in a cardiology partnership that Isala has invested in.

The Zwolle hospital declines all responsibility for treatments in Indonesia as part of the partnership. “Isala has never had any involvement in activities that individual cardiologists from Zwolle carried out there. Therefore, patients treated there are not known to Isala, so Isala could not check them.” The newspaper pointed out that Jakartta patients received a hospital card with Isala’s name on it. The hospital responded it must have been “improper use of items,” stressing that there are no more contacts with Indonesia from its cardiology department.

NRC also discovered that, in the past, Isala cardiologists placed innovative wireless pacemakers in patients as part of scientific research. These devices turned out to have many flaws, and since October 2016, the American manufacturer Abbott has advised doctors to monitor patients every month if they’ve had the device for more than two years. According to the newspaper, the Isala doctors aren’t following this advice, only monitoring patients every three months. The hospital said that the doctors decide “on the basis of the individual medical situation” whether “this extra check” is necessary.