America’s hospitals and their dedicated staff helps us fight disease and suffering by delivering life-saving and life-enhancing care every day in an astounding variety of ways.
From helping set a broken leg or responding to an emerging viral threat, to assisting and performing delicate heart surgeries on tiny newborns, these hospital personnel are the front line of surveillance, vigilance, and intervention.
Throughout their work day, hospital staff use a variety of medical devices: imaging machines, EKGs and in vitro tests to make diagnoses; infusion pumps, ventilators and robotics to provide treatment, and an array of implants to replace diseased joints and organs. And, as the nation’s hubs for real-time health care data, hospitals are uniquely positioned to help identify new safety problems with devices as well as changes in the frequency of already known safety problems because they use these technologies in the real-world setting of clinical practice, outside of the more controlled setting of a clinical trial.
FDA is looking to improve the way we work with hospitals to modernize and streamline data collection about medical devices.
Given the greater diversity and complexity of medical devices today; the rapid technological advances and iterative nature of medical device product development; the interface between the technology and the user – including the learning curve associated with adopting new technology; and, in some cases, a relatively short product life cycle that can be measured in months, not years; FDA’s evaluation of medical device safety presents unique challenges not seen with drugs and biologics. Therefore, assuring the safety of medical devices depends on many factors and should a problem arise, it could be due to a variety of causes.
At the time of premarket evaluation, however, it is not feasible to identify all possible risks or to have absolute certainty regarding a technology’s benefit-risk profile. Among other reasons, studies required to do so would likely be prohibitively large in order to capture less frequent and more unpredictable effects or consequences. In addition, such larger studies still may not reflect the true benefit-risk profile of the device. Once a device is on the market, for example, doctors may use it beyond the FDA cleared intended use. In addition, subsequent modifications to the device or changes in how the device is used in practice can result in new safety risks or greater frequency of known risks.
