Determining if your product or innovation should be considered a component or an accessory is a critical early-life cycle inflection point. In fact, the distinction between the two terms has long been the subject of debate and interpretation. In August 2017, the FDA began a new effort to classify a “list of [medical device] accessories...
Documents, documents everywhere. But which are the records, which are documents—what is the difference and why does it matter? Even start-up medical device companies are neck deep in documentation. In addition to documents generated during the creation and production of a product or combination device, additional documentation is generated while working with the FDA Q-Subs,...
We are currently seeing significant technological advances in medical devices, hospital networks and patient care. As medical devices become increasingly interconnected via the Internet, hospital networks, other medical devices, and smartphones, there is an increased risk of exploitation of cybersecurity vulnerabilities, some of which could affect a device’s performance, functionality and safety to the patient....
The FDA is now trying to track what it’s calling “emerging safety signals.” Recently, a study found a possible link between reduced leaflet mobility in TAVRs and the incidence of stroke in the fall. When people turned to the FDA looking for insight, the agency responded with, “Limited available data do not allow us to...
Part 1 – Medical Device Software, the FDA and the US Congress Preface: In any given 2-week period, an average of 15% to 20% of the applications on my smartphone have new versions to fix software bugs. Others I speak with experience similar statistics. And, that doesn’t include how often my smartphone software crashes while...
Endoscopes Linked to “Superbugs” Lead to New FDA Guidance for Reusable Medical Devices UPDATE The FDA has released the slides from their presentation on Reprocessing Medical Devices. Get the slides here. In light of the fatal “superbugs” that have been plaguing hospitals after using endoscopes, the FDA has released new guidance for reusable medical devices....
Establish the Safety of Your Medical Device with IEC 60601 Compliance In our experience, the most frequently forgotten aspect of medical device development and commercialization from emerging companies is establishing a safety profile of a product. While clinical data or clinical trials may be necessary for establishing safety for some products, many Class II devices...
Benefits and Risks of Moving to the Cloud Migrating to the Cloud: What are the Benefits? According to the National Institute of Standards and Technology, the cloud is “a model for enabling convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications, and services) that can be rapidly...