Today’s guest post comes from our Reed Smith colleague Jamie Lanphear on a topic near and dear to the Blog’s heart: The new EU Product Liability Directive. As always, our guest posters deserve 100% of the credit, and any blame, for their posts. But, also as usual, our guest posters deliver the goods, so we
Software
Yes Virginia, Software Can Be A Product

The idea that software can be a product (as in “product liability”) is not new, but gray areas remain with regard to when that should be and how courts should handle it. Take for example a case that we wrote on a couple of years ago, in which a district judge in Virginia granted summary judgment for the manufacturer of an electronic health records (“EHR”) system. A patient suffered severe complications after a doctor entered post-op instructions into the hospital’s EHR computer system, but the hospital implemented the orders at the wrong time. Whose fault was that? We don’t know, but the district court ruled that, even though the patient’s experts identified software changes that would have made the system safer, they did not identify a standard of care that the EHR system failed to meet.
Well, a couple of weeks ago, the Fourth Circuit reversed and held that the experts had very well identified a standard of care and further that there was evidence sufficient to support a failure-to-warn claim. The case is Lowe v. Cerner Corp., No. 20-2270, 2022 WL 17269066 (4th Cir. Nov. 29, 2022), and the facts are worth repeating. Following surgery, the patient’s surgeon entered orders for “continuous pulse oximetry” into the EHR software developed by the defendant and deployed by the hospital. However, although the surgeon intended for pulse oximetry—i.e., checking blood oxygen—to be continuous, she chose “once” and “daily” from the system’s dropdown menus, which defaulted to 10:00 each day. The system correctly displayed that time on the order confirmation screen, but several orders were entered that day, and the surgeon did not scroll down to review them all. She clicked through some version of “accept all.” Unfortunately, checking blood oxygen at 10:00 was too late for this poor patient, who suffered severe and permanent disability. Id. at *2-*3. Continue Reading Yes Virginia, Software Can Be A Product
Unintended Consequences for Software Liability?

We have been following the issue of potential product liability for software, including in connection with medical devices, for a while. Much of our attention, predictably, has been on FDA regulation of device software, including issues related to resistance to hacking to obtain information or cause harm. Like here, here, here, and…