The U.S. Office of the National Coordinator has proposed to significantly whittle back the regulations pertaining to electronic health records, changes that would save small businesses significant sums in terms of compliance activities.
Australia’s Therapeutic Goods Administration reported June 30 several new regulatory requirements are in effect, including a new mandate regarding the use of unique device identifiers for implanted medical devices.
The U.S. Government Accountability Office’s report on FDA oversight of medical devices acknowledges that the agency has made strides in its efforts to develop surveillance systems to track adverse events, but there are shortcomings.
Recent regulatory reforms to Australia’s medical device framework have shown Australia’s Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) a new way of collaborating with industry to make improvements and ensure patient safety, said Tracey Duffy, deputy secretary for the TGA’s Medical Devices and Product Quality Division, during the recent Ausmedtech conference in Adelaide.
The FDA’s device center has posted a draft guidance that addresses unique device identifier (UDI) code requirements applied to low-risk products. The select update offers enforcement discretion in some instances for class I consumer health products, a switch partly justified by the exceedingly low risk presented by such products.
Device makers have argued for years that not all medical device recalls are the same, and thus the FDA should be more forthcoming with the public about the difference between a recall that is accompanied by a market withdrawal and a recall that driven by something as innocuous as a minor adjustment to the product label.
The European Commission’s Medical Device Coordination Group has posted several guidances for unique device identifiers (UDIs), the most recent of which is related to a company’s quality management system. While most regulators have developed policies related to UDIs, this MDCG guidance recommends that device makers formally incorporate those requirements into their QMS programs, and that notified bodies will examine the manufacturer’s compliance with these requirements during inspections.
The FDA’s draft guidance for the form and content of unique device identifiers (UDIs) may have lacked the controversy of some other policies, but the 2016 draft languished for five years even though only 10 comments appear in the docket. While the agency made some concessions regarding substantial edits of the draft, the final retains a need for data delimiters in the definition of “easily readable” plain text in UDIs, despite industry’s argument that this was not required in the agency’s UDI rulemaking.
PERTH, Australia – It was already going to be a busy year for Australia’s Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) as it planned to implement the final wave of device reforms in 2020 before the COVID-19 pandemic hit. The delay to the EU Medical Device Regulation (MDR) as a result of the pandemic will mean that Australia will also push back many of its device reforms for another year, said John Skerritt, the TGA’s deputy secretary of the Health Products Regulation Group.
PERTH, Australia – Australia’s Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) is seeking industry feedback on further strengthening reforms for adverse events and postmarket regulations for medical devices.
