-: My name is Christen Rees.
I work for Roche Diagnostics Diabetes Care
and I'm the head of Medical Safety.
Medical safety is making sure that the products
that we develop are safe for our users
and our end customers.
And what my department and role entails is overseeing
the safe development and the safe use
of our products by our customers.
So not only when they're being developed internally
but also after they launch, making sure
that our patients understand how to use them correctly
and that they are working as intended.
While they're in development,
we do testing with human factors,
so we have people come in and test models of our products
to make sure that they understand how they work
and understand how to use them appropriately.
We also do lots of testing on our products,
just testing them over and over and over to make sure
that everything is working as it's supposed to
before they launch.
It's called Customer Care.
We have a 1-800 number on all of the products that we sell
and if a user thinks that they're not working appropriately,
they call that number.
And then we have a troubleshooting guide
that every call center operator uses to identify
if there is something that needs to be investigated
with that product or if not.
And then those get escalated based on
if something might not be working properly
and then my department would then investigate that
from a medical perspective to see if there is a chance
that a patient or a user would be at risk,
based on how that device was functioning.
And then it just goes on from there.
There's a whole decision tree of how everything takes place.
But we basically assess it from a medical point of view
to see if there's any risk to the patient
and then take action based on that decision.