CardioBuzz is a blog by Todd Neale for readers with an interest in cardiology.
Former Vice President Dick Cheney that he had the wireless function on his implantable cardioverter-defibrillator (ICD) turned off for fear that the device could be hacked and made to discharge a fatal shock. Such a scenario was later depicted in the Showtime series "Homeland," and experts have since weighed in to say such an act is .
But how might turning off the wireless function on an ICD affect patient care?
Turning off the wireless function would not have an impact on the effectiveness of the device, but it would affect patient follow-up, according to , chair of the Department of Medicine at the University at Buffalo in New York.
"If the wireless function is turned off, the patient would need to come into the office for routine follow-up. That is how we have done follow-up for years, so it would not be a big change, simply a little less convenient for the patient," she told 51˶ in an email. "ICDs are usually checked every 3 months or so."
"If a problem develops such as a lead or generator problem, remote follow-up could pick it up faster than waiting for a scheduled office visit," Curtis continued. "However, such problems are very infrequent."
, clinical professor of medicine at Rutgers-Robert Wood Johnson Medical School in New Brunswick, N.J., said it would not be necessary to turn on the wireless function temporarily to interrogate the device during those follow-up visits.
He noted that shutting off the wireless function would reduce the monitoring capabilities of the ICD because wireless "allows for remote interrogation of the device periodically to automatically send an updated status to a central monitoring service or an urgent message if the device identified an arrhythmia or was activated to give treatments."
, section head of the Heart Rhythm Center in the Beaumont Health System in Royal Oak, Mich., commented that the wireless function was added in recent years as a convenience to patients and that when an ICD's wireless function is turned off, "it reverts to the type of device we had up until the last 5 years where the patient needed to physically go to the pacemaker clinic for device interrogation and data download."
"That system worked very satisfactorily," Haines said. "I am sure that Mr. Cheney has access to in-person device interrogation any time he wants it."
As for whether terrorists could hack into an ICD via a wireless connection and reprogram it to cause harm, he said, "I don't know, but I don't doubt it."