Advice: Pavemaker Transmitter never Paired with Actual pacemaker. Anyone have a similar experience?

I am not familiar with the monitoring of these things but the first thing I thought was his heart team should have made sure that everything was in sinc and follow up when needed. You should have been shown what needed to be done. You can't expect the SNF to know what to do if not told. The people that see your Dad mostly are CNA that are not trained for this type of thing. It would need to be an LPN or RN. And if the doctor was getting no readings, he should have informed you or the Nurses desk at Dads facility.

I seem to recall that after mom's pacemaker transmitter was set up by the pacemaker company techs who came to the NH. A few months later, it got unplugged and we received notification from the company that something was amiss and they came out to check and fix the problem.

It was actually your/dads's responsibility, or the POAs responsibility if you are not dad's POA, to make sure the transmitter was plugged in and set up in his room on his nightstand at the SNF when he was moved in on day one. The machine automatically records the pacemaker info and sends it to the monitoring facility; my husband's is Boston Scientific and monitored by his insurance company, Kaiser Permanente. Every few months, he has a call scheduled with KP to go over his pacemaker activity as recorded; he sits by the transmitter while on the phone to the nurse at KP; she talks to him about the findings for a few minutes, and that's that.

If there was a disastrous/emergency event that occurred with the pacemaker, and the transmitter was plugged in and set up, my husband WOULD get a phone call with instructions to follow from a human being.

The PM info should be stored since January and you may have access to it now if you can figure out who to call. Dad should have an ID card in his wallet with the pacemaker name & type, with phone numbers on it to call for help.

Unless your father has a cardiologist at the SNF who comes in to see him, I doubt anyone would have knowledge about his pacemaker or the transmitter. This information is given to the patient at the time of the surgical procedure.

Good luck.

I don't think the OP is expecting any doctor to visit her father - the point is that he (father) paid for a superwhizz device that would send real time information to... whoever, and the superwhizz device has not been connected to whatever is supposed to transmit the information and therefore might as well have been talking to itself for 18 months. Is the thing.

And meanwhile, data that *could* possibly have alerted the right people in time to avert his recent suspected cardiac event just stayed put inside his chest.

I don't blame her for being miffed, only I doubt if this ever was the facility's responsibility.

PS And, if follow up appointments weren't put in place because the implanters expected to be able to carry out check-ups remotely, then all the more so.

It might still have been recorded, even though not transmitted. At my mother's last echocardiogram, I was fascinated by the timeline the cardiac physiologist described to us.

It's actually the responsibility of whoever inserted the ICD to set up the systems and provide aftercare. If the SNF needed to do anything about the device's transmissions they should have been told what and how; and moreoever if no data were being received why wasn't that followed up? Has your father been back to cardiology for monitoring and maintenance since Jan 2021? - I think we had six-monthly checks, as far as I remember.

So - I wouldn't blame the SNF, no. Is your father okay?