The U.S. FDA’s Center for Devices and Radiological Health is recovering from a guidance drought that spanned several months in the first part of calendar year 2025, starting with a guidance on the Q-sub process.

U.S. Medicare coverage of telehealth and telemedicine sometimes seems to lag inappropriately, but fears of fraud were borne out in a conviction obtained recently by the Department of Justice.

The U.S. Federal Trade Commission said it sent letters to 37 contact lens prescribers reminding them a failure to automatically provide patients with a prescription can result in fines of more than $53,000 per violation.

The U.K. National Institute for Health and Care Excellence reported it will streamline its health technology assessment, but the bigger news might be that the agency will no longer require new technologies prove to be cost saving to win an endorsement from the agency.

The U.S. FDA reported the launch of its in-house generative AI (GenAI) tool, dubbed Elsa, for a variety of purposes. FDA commissioner Marty Makary assuaged industry’s privacy concerns by promising that the algorithm does not train on data submitted by makers of devices and pharmaceuticals.

The Trump administration released its budget proposal for fiscal year 2026, which would chop roughly 40% from the NIH budget over the current fiscal year — a proposal that might not find much support on Capitol Hill.

The U.S. FDA declined to appeal the outcome of a lawsuit eviscerating the agency’s final rule for regulation of lab-developed tests despite a 60-day window to do so.

The U.S. Department of Justice is reshuffling its enforcement focus for the coming three years per a May 12 memo attributed to Matthew Galeotti, director of the department’s criminal division. Galeotti said federal attorneys should avoid prosecutorial adventurism in an effort to strike what he described as “an appropriate balance” between enforcement and “unnecessary burdens on American enterprise.”

The U.S. FDA’s device guidance drought ended with the issuance of one draft and one final guidance, the latter of which deals with the Q-sub program for early interaction with sponsors of device applications. Per a request by industry, the agency indicated it is amenable to including FDA policy staff during these meetings, which may help to avoid surprises in premarket applications.

The doctrine of inherent disclosure is not one of the more common methods for invalidating patent claims, but this doctrine led the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit to declare that several claims found in a patent held by Carl Zeiss X-Ray Microscopy Inc. are invalid.