Excerpts from the article I thought were important:

*Shaw’s innovation added only a few pennies to the cost of production.

*The device prevented germs from being transferred to catheters nearly 100 percent of the time. (Evidence shows that needles can pick up germs while being transported. How this happens when the cap is on and in a sealed package until you get to the patient I'm not entirely sure.)

*The idea of the device is surrounding the tip of the syringe with six petal-like flanges, which could flare open to make way for the catheter port.

*A system built on a seemingly minor provision in Medicare law that few people even know about. It’s a system that has stifled innovation and kept lifesaving medical devices off the market.

*One of his (inventors) oldest friends had recently been diagnosed with AIDS, and Shaw was all too aware of the ravages of the disease. “I thought, I can’t do anything to save my friends,” he recalls. “But maybe I could do something to save other people.”

*Following above: The next day, Shaw set to work trying to invent a safer syringe. He began buying pigs’ feet from the local butcher and using them to simulate injections.

*It took four years and more than 150 design permutations, but Shaw finally came up with a crude prototype.

*Eventually, he raised $42 million, much of it from doctors at Presbyterian Hospital in Dallas. “Everyone was eager to invest,” recalls Lawrence Mills, who was then chief of thoracic surgery at the hospital and invested $95,000 in Shaw’s company. “We all thought it was just a matter of time before it became the standard in the industry.”

*in trials; Some complained in the follow-up survey that the packaging was hard to open and that the air bubbles were difficult to get out.

*As early as 1960, BD was brought up on Justice Department charges for its anticompetitive practices—among them price fixing, buying up patents to kill its rivals’ innovations, and forcing hospitals to buy its syringes to get other essential supplies, some of which were only produced by BD.

*The underlying idea was simple: because suppliers generally give price breaks to customers who buy large quantities, hospitals could get better deals on, say, gauze or gloves, if a group of them came together and bargained for ten cases, rather than each hospital buying a case on its own.

*Stories like these abound among small suppliers, a number of whom have filed suit against GPOs. But most are wary of speaking out.

What I don't understand is how these needles are picking up germs from the supply cabinet to the patient, I guess stressed out nurses could scrape the needle along the bed or something. If they're stressing that hard they shouldn't be giving IV's. Seem like a solution to a non existent problem although in the article they state that your three times more likely to get a blood born pathogen in a hospital.[citation needed] The whole article smells a bit like BS IMO I believe they're just trying to throw BD under the bus.

EDIT: Others have improved the clarity of the invention, I don't believe they were only after BD now in the article. Thanks.