Payers had their hands full in 2025 dealing with the raft of medical technologies that came through the globe’s regulatory review processes, although the nature of many of those challenges were conventional. On the other hand, payers struggled to keep pace with both the volume of conventional devices and the novelty of AI-driven devices in 2025, a problem that will carry over into the coming year.
The U.K. Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency has laid out an approach to medical products for rare diseases, which the agency said afflict 3.5 million U.K. citizens. One of the objectives of this program is to simplify evidence requirements for these therapies with the hope of providing patients with more rapid access to much-needed therapeutic options.
The International Medical Device Regulators Forum (IMDRF) has issued a draft guidance for predetermined change control plans for software as a medical device. The problem for advocates of regulatory harmonization is that the IMDRF draft overlaps awkwardly with the FDA’s approach, which has issued separate policies for the AI subset of device software functions and a separate guidance for all other devices, including non-AI software.
The U.S. FDA typically announces its inspections at facilities located outside the U.S. – a courtesy not extended to domestic manufacturing sites. This is about to change per an agency press release quoting commissioner Marty Makary as describing the disparate treatment as a double standard.
The U.K. Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) unveiled the pilot version of its AI Airlock in 2024, and the agency posted a list of the products that are taking part in this version of a regulatory sandbox.
Australia’s Therapeutic Goods Administration floated a draft rule on risk classification for in vitro diagnostics, which does not apply to home use tests, the subject of impending rulemaking.
The U.K. Medicines and Health Care Products Regulatory Agency reported a pilot program for the use of RWE in regulatory decision making, which is largely directed toward drug products.
The U.K.’s new postmarket monitoring requirements do not represent a sea change in device makers’ responsibilities in this area, but the expansions of responsibility are nonetheless significant.
The U.K.'s Medicines and Health Care Products Regulatory Agency chose five technologies for its AI Airlock pilot program as it looks to understand the best way to regulate artificial intelligence-powered medical devices so that they can be safely deployed across the national health service.
The U.K. Medicines and Health Care Products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) is among the regulators across the globe that are scrambling to keep pace with artificial intelligence (AI) in medical devices, releasing an April 30, 2024, paper on its own approach. One of the key considerations in this paper is that MHRA expects to up-classify some AI-enabled device software functions in its ongoing regulatory revamp, a prediction that suggests a more stringent premarket path for these products in the years ahead.
