The World Health Organization (WHO) on Wednesday released a first-of-its-kind guideline on 10 ways for countries to apply digital health interventions across the health system while avoiding potential detrimental effects. The 10 recommendations are detailed in the UN agency’s 124-page guideline for strengthening health systems through the appropriate implementation of digital health. The focus of the guideline is currently limited to digital health technologies that can...

The World Health Organization (WHO) released a newly drafted four-year global strategy on digital health, with an aim to “improve health for everyone, everywhere by accelerating the adoption of appropriate digital health.” As more health care delivery systems look to digital health to address emerging challenges, such as the rise of noncommunicable diseases, clinician workforce shortages and the aging population, barriers to the adoption and application of such tools pe...

The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) requested feedback Tuesday on a new discussion paper that proposes applying a “focused review” approach to premarket assessments of software as a medical device (SaMD) technologies that are powered by artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML). The agency said it may conduct a “focused review” in cases where proposed SaMD pre-specifications (SPS) and algorithm change protocols (ACP) “can be refined based on the real-...

The US Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) regulation of prescription drug-use-related software (PDURS) behooves alignment across relevant centers, industry comments on FDA’s proposed framework argued. From pharmaceutical companies and trade associations to digital health companies and coalitions, the agency’s November 2018 proposed framework for the future regulation of PDURS drew comments from a range of stakeholders. The proposed framework  on PDURS is largely seen...

In a proposed rule from the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), the agency is seeking input on whether to expand on the US Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) digital health pre-certification (PreCert) program for purposes of health IT certification. Yet FDA has said it will limit PreCert participation, for now. The 724-page proposed rule was unveiled on Monday by HHS’s Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC). The move h...

Health Canada released a draft guidance document on Tuesday to aid industry in determining whether the agency intends to regulate a software product as software as a medical device (SaMD). Health Canada notified industry last year of its intent to release draft guidance on SaMD as part of a larger initiative to improve regulatory reviews. The timeline, however, was delayed after a Health Canada scientific advisory panel raised concerns over the previous approach, whic...

A scientific advisory panel on software as a medical device (SaMD) convened in January by Health Canada caused the agency to hit the brakes on a draft guidance document. The advisory panel, which included the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), Canada’s medical technology companies (MEDEC), the Council of Canadian Innovators (CCI) and the National Research Council, among others, deliberated on questions Health Canada provided regarding its draft guidance on SaMD ...

With a proposed deadline of 9 November, three US senators sent a letter to the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) on Wednesday to request more information on the agency’s pre-certification program for digital health.   FDA’s Center for Devices and Radiological Health (CDRH) recently adapted its regulatory processes to the rapidly evolving nature of digital health, while also encouraging questions like those from Sens. Patty Murray (D-WA), Elizabeth Warren (D-MA)...

The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) on Thursday unveiled three guidance documents – two draft and one final – that clarify which types of software will be regulated. One of the draft guidances, the 13-page “ Clinical and Patient Decision Support Software ,” outlines which types of clinical decision support software (CDS), which can compare patient-specific signs with available clinical guidelines to recommend treatments, would no longer be defined as a medic...

US Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Scott Gottlieb took the stage Tuesday at AdvaMed’s MedTech conference in San Jose, California, unveiling the nine companies selected among 103 applicants to participate in the agency’s precertification pilot for digital health applications. FDA  launched the pre-cert pilot  in July as part of the agency’s  Digital Health Innovation Action Plan. The pilot participants, representing a range of companies and technology in the ...

Details of how the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is planning to tackle the growing digital health industry are slowly trickling out, and on Wednesday the agency announced it will establish an Entrepreneur-in-Residence (EIR) Program to support and help develop its Software Precertification (PreCert) Pilot Program. The idea is to embed these entrepreneurs for a minimum of three days per week on FDA’s White Oak campus to help analyze software business processes...

The US Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) recent push to reshape how it regulates digital health products with shifts to third-party certification and more postmarket reviews is called into question by three law professors in Health Affairs , who offer up three questions about the direction of the plan. First, the professors from Southern Methodist University, Indiana University and Harvard write that the recently passed 21st Century Cures Act does not includ...