I’ve started a survey to try to get a better sense of the failure rates of various pumps. I got the idea for this after checking out some of the various discussions/debates/arguments/shouting matches for/against various brands of insulin pumps. Please feel free to add your $0.02 here:
If you have experience with different pumps, please feel free to add multiple entries to the survey. If you’re like me an only have used one pump, then please just make one entry. Once some data starts to accumulate, I’ll see what sort of reports I can generate.
I think I saw your data. Without a paid membership, I won’t be able to make anything fancy through the gizmo website. However…
I can download the data and do some of my own crosstab analyses to link pump models with their various failure rates. As it is, lumping the failure rates of all the different models together is hardly informative, IMHO.
Once the data accumulates, I’ll start to assemble some more useful interpretive data.
I agree with Dave on this one. I think there are too few options in the question. When you ask about pump failure “per month”, that assumes a lot of failure or none. My Cozmo failed once in 4 years. So my instinct was to write zero, but that misses the one time that it did fail ( and that was not fun-- even though it only happened once).
Also, since some “pump failure” is actually caused by bad infusion sets (rather than bad pumps). It might be interesting to ask what infusion set people generally use. Just an idea!
A PS : I mentioned in my reply same as Kristin , third paragraph pump failure versa bad infusion sets /bad placement of infusion sets …survey becoming complex , ha , ha ??
Good luck
Here’s the data so far (2009-03030, 1pm EST), based on a total of 34 pump entries. The sample size is really small, so I won’t attempt any grandiose interpretations. Based on the available data, it appears the Omnipod is most likely to have problems, while the other pumps have similar monthly failure/error rates (see bar chart).
More disheartening, for the Omnipod users, is the types of failure/errors (table). 67% of those using the Omnipod (two out of three respondents) reported a “complete pump failure.” Overall, the most common problems were occlusions or blockages of the infusion site or tube, which are in fact not really “pump” errors.
I hope to receive more answers to the survey, so we can get a larger pool of data together, which hopefully can give us all a better idea of how well these various pumps are working. I’m also going to start drafting up a new survey that will address comments that get posted in this forum. So please get the suggestions and criticisms coming.
Cheers all, and thanks for your input!
Mike
DISCLAIMER: One survey respondent indicated he/she had 6+ errors per month on the MINIMED Paradigm, but in the comments section of the question said that errors were only very occasional. So I assume that person meant 6 or so errors total, not monthly. I’ve changed that entry to 1-2 times per month. 7583-pump_monthly_failure_rates_20090330.jpg (320 KB) 7584-pump_failure_types_20090330.jpg (340 KB)
Mike,
I would be curious to see the progression of this kind of survey since you last did it. Would this be something you’d be interested in looking into?
I closed down the survey back about the time I posted the results above. I got a lot of survey participants in the first couple weeks, then the data really tailed off, and people no longer added any data. I could look into redoing the survey and running it again. One of these days…
