Larkin Community Hospital, based in Miami, Florida, has sued Intuitive Surgical, Inc. (Intuitive) over claims of abuse of monopoly power. Intuitive holds a considerable amount of leverage within the medical world as the producer of the da Vinci Surgical Robot System and its accompanying EndoWrist instruments, the complaint alleged. The plaintiff is also seeking class certification for itself and other entities that directly paid the company for their services.
Intuitive is one of the sole producers of surgical robots in the United States, and they supply their robots to hospitals all over the country. The company has organized in a way that requires hospitals that are buying or leasing the robot to also buy all robot services and necessary robot instruments from Intuitive. This ties the selling of da Vinci robots to its accompanying instruments (EndoWrists) and services, all of which are produced by Intuitive.
The plaintiffs assert that the interdependency Intuitive’s products have on one another has led to the creation of a monopoly in five fields, including the surgical robot market, the surgical robot instrument market, the repair and replacement of surgical robots and surgical robot instrument market, the da Vinci robot service aftermarket, and lastly the services aftermarket for EndoWrist instruments. For example, da Vinci robots can only be in use with the presence of EndoWrist instruments, according to the plaintiff, which can only be used 10 times and then must be replaced according to contract. The replacement and servicing is also required to be done by Intuitive. In this way, Intuitive “captures nearly 100% of the U.S. market,” for these five respective realms.
Because of their alleged complete domination of surgical markets, the plaintiffs argue that the anticompetitive conduct Intuitive engages in has “significantly increased costs to Plaintiff.” Further, other surgical robot companies are all but excluded from their prospective markets due to the “high barriers to entry.” The plaintiff seeks class certification and treble damages, citing that there is no “legitimate business, safety, or efficiency justification for Intuitive’s anticompetitive scheme,” absent of turning a significant profit as a result of their various monopolies.Larkin Community Hospital is represented by Hausfeld.
This is the second such suit filed against Intuitive this month,
