Digital health devices: FDA ’ s plan for innovation

Dr. Scott Gottlieb, FDA commissioner 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 softw...
Source: Mass Device - Category: Medical Devices Authors: Tags: Blog Food & Drug Administration (FDA) mHealth (Mobile Health) News Well FDA Voice Source Type: news