Patient safety may be compromised if study conclusions are generalized to products that make similar claims but have no equivalent research evidence

Abstract

This paper addresses a fundamentally important issue in health care, namely how to make informed decisions on product selection when two products, from different manufacturers, appear to be similar and have medical claims that sound comparable. In such cases, manufacturers of competing products often use each other’s evidence. They argue that the published evidence is generally applicable even if the original bioengineering tests and clinical trials were performed on a specific product, and no equivalence was obtained for their product that has similar medical claims. In this work, we use prophylactic dressings for pressure injury prevention as a good demonstrative example on how patient saf..