Legislation Seeks to Deregulate Medical Software

Introduced in the House back in October was the wittily named Sensible Oversight for Technology which Advances Regulatory Efficiency Act of 2013 which has the acronym SOFTWARE. Not to be outdone on the creation of legislative acronyms, now comes the Senate version with a bill entitled Preventing Regulatory Overreach To Enhance Care Technology, which of course gives us PROTECT. Both of these bills seek to define and sub-define medically related software, and then to take part of what they have defined away from the FDA, and do something else with it that has not yet been clearly identified. The premise of these bills is that the FDA inhibits entrepreneurs by peskily requiring, at least in some cases, that the developer meet regulations that are supposed to provide some measure of safety and efficacy before these products are used for or by the public. These issues arise in part because the definition of a medical device does not explicitly include or exclude software. This has allowed the occasional debate about whether and what kind of software is or is not a medical device. The FDA’s position is to simply look at the function of the software and the definition, and then to say that if what the software does meets the definition then it is a medical device. Debating this with the FDA is typically not a fruitful endeavor. Some other countries have explicitly included software, presumably to try to end the discussion. For example the UK explicitly includes “softwa...
Source: Medical Connectivity Consulting - Category: Technology Consultants Authors: Tags: Standards & Regulatory Source Type: blogs