Fostering Medical Innovation: A Plan for Digital Health Devices

It is incumbent upon FDA to ensure that we have the right policies in place to promote and encourage safe and effective innovation that can benefit consumers, and adopt regulatory approaches to enable the efficient development of these technologies. By taking an efficient, risk-based approach to our regulation, FDA can promote health through the creation of more new and beneficial medical technologies. We can also help reduce the development costs for these innovations by making sure that our own policies and tools are modern and efficient, giving entrepreneurs more opportunities to develop products that can benefit people’s lives.

To this end, FDA will soon be putting forward a broad initiative that is focused on fostering new innovation across our medical product centers. I will have more to say on many elements of this initiative soon. However, today I want to focus on one critical aspect of this innovation initiative: A new Digital Health Innovation Plan that is focused on fostering innovation at the intersection of medicine and digital health technology. This plan will include a novel, post-market approach to how we intend to regulate these digital medical devices.

According to one estimate, last year there were 165,000 health-related apps available for Apple or Android smartphones. Forecasts predict that such apps would be downloaded 1.7 billion times by 2017. From mobile apps and fitness trackers to clinical decision support software, innovative digital technologies have the power to transform health care in important ways, such as:

• Empowering consumers to make more and better decisions every day about their own health, monitor and manage chronic health conditions, or connect with medical professionals, using consumer-directed apps and other technologies to help people live healthier lifestyles through fitness, nutrition, and wellness monitoring;
• Enabling better and more efficient clinical practice and decision making through decision support software and technologies to assist in making diagnoses and developing treatment options; managing, storing, and sharing health records; and managing schedules and workflow;
• Helping to address public health crises, such as the opioid epidemic that is devastating many American communities. In fact, FDA conducted a prize competition to encourage the development of a mobile app to help connect opioid users experiencing an overdose with nearby carriers of the prescription drug naloxone for emergency treatment.

For these and other digital technologies to take hold and reach their fullest potential, it is critical that FDA be forward-leaning in making sure that we have implemented the right policies and regulatory tools, and communicated them clearly, to encourage safe and effective innovation. In this rapidly changing environment, ambiguity regarding how FDA will approach a new technology can lead innovators to invest their time and resources in other ventures. To encourage innovation, FDA should carry out its mission to protect and promote the public health through policies that are clear enough for developers to apply them on their own, without having to seek out, on a case-by-case basis, FDA’s position on every individual technological change or iterative software development.

Congress has already taken a major step to advance these goals in the 21st Century Cures Act. Expanding upon policies advanced by FDA’s Center for Devices and Radiological Health (CDRH), the Act revised FDA’s governing statute to, among other things, make clear that certain digital health technologies—such as clinical administrative support software and mobile apps that are intended only for maintaining or encouraging a healthy lifestyle—generally fall outside the scope of FDA regulation. Such technologies tend to pose low risk to patients but can provide great value to the health care system. FDA, led by CDRH, is working to implement the digital health provisions of the 21st Century Cures Act and, in the coming months, will be publishing guidance to further clarify what falls outside the scope of FDA regulation and to explain how the new statutory provisions affect pre-existing FDA policies.

FDA will provide guidance to clarify our position on products that contain multiple software functions, where some fall outside the scope of FDA regulation, but others do not. In addition, FDA will provide new guidance on other technologies that, although not addressed in the 21st Century Cures Act, present low enough risks that FDA does not intend to subject them to certain pre-market regulatory requirements. Greater certainty regarding what types of digital health technology is subject to regulation and regarding FDA’s compliance policies will not only help foster innovation, but also will help the agency to devote more resources to higher risk priorities.

In addition to these efforts, we are also announcing today a new initiative that FDA is undertaking. This fall, as part of a comprehensive approach to the regulation of digital health tools and in collaboration with our customers, FDA will pilot an entirely new approach toward regulating this technology. This will be the cornerstone to a more efficient, risk-based regulatory framework for overseeing these medical technologies.

While the pilot program is still being developed, we are considering whether and how, under current authorities, we can create a third party certification program under which lower risk digital health products could be marketed without FDA premarket review and higher risk products could be marketed with a streamlined FDA premarket review. Certification could be used to assess, for example, whether a company consistently and reliably engages in high quality software design and testing (validation) and ongoing maintenance of its software products. Employing a unique pre-certification program for software as a medical device (SaMD) could reduce the time and cost of market entry for digital health technologies.

In addition, post-market collection of real-world data might be able to be used to support new and evolving product functions. For example, product developers could leverage real-world data gathered through the National Evaluation System for health Technology (NEST) to expedite market entry and subsequent expansion of indications more efficiently. NEST will be a federated virtual system for evidence generation composed of strategic alliances among data sources including registries, electronic health records, payer claims, and other sources. The Medical Device Innovation Consortium (MDIC), a 501(c)(3) public-private partnership, is serving as an independent coordinating center that operates NEST. In the coming weeks, MDIC will announce the establishment of a Governing Committee for the NEST Coordinating Center comprised of stakeholder representatives of the ecosystem, such as patients, health care professionals, health care organizations, payers, industry, and government. Although FDA does not own or operate NEST, we have been establishing strategic alliances among data sources to accelerate NEST’s launch with the initial version of a fully operational system anticipated by the end of 2019.

Applying this firm-based approach, rather than the traditional product-based approach, combined with leveraging real-world evidence, would create market incentives for greater investment in and growth of the digital health technology industry. Such processes could enable developers to deploy new or updated software more rapidly and would help FDA to better focus our resources.

Through these and other steps, FDA will help innovators navigate a new, modern regulatory process so that promising, safe and effective developments in digital health can advance more quickly and responsibly, and Americans can reap the full benefits from these innovations. These efforts are just one part of a much broader initiative that FDA is currently undertaking to advance policies that promote the development of safe and effective medical technologies that can help consumers improve their health. Our goal is to make sure that FDA has the most modern and efficient regulatory approaches when it comes to evaluating new, beneficial technologies.

Scott Gottlieb, M.D., is Commissioner of the U.S. Food and Drug AdministrationThis post was originally published on the FDA Voice blog.