Regulatory
and in predicting the risk of developing diseases,” is how Dr Sonja Marjanovic, director for healthcare innovation, industry and policy at RAND Europe puts it – a reasonable point when you recall that the robust use of big data can cut the average ER stay by up to 40%. Yet, whatever its rising authority, it’s equally clear that regulators have traditionally battled to fit the SaMD peg into a hole long shaped by physical medical devices – a problem that’s long stymied how insiders have been able to actually use medical software in practice. Now, however, with new, flexible regulation appearing on the horizon, SaMD could soon take a spot alongside more old-fashioned medical devices – with potentially revolutionary consequences for patients.
Software, hard work It’s hard to overstate how quickly SaMD – as a medical concept, if not a regulatory reality – has developed over recent years. Boasting a global market expected to reach $86bn by 2027, it’s increasingly proving its usefulness everywhere from MRIs to CT scans. Understand the proliferation of medical information over recent years and this jump makes sense; with around 30% of the world’s data now being generated by the healthcare industry, it was probably inevitable that insiders would seek to exploit it for the benefit of patients. In practice, SaMD includes a wide variety of different technologies. At the simpler end, an example could involve a piece of software that sends images from an MRI machine to a doctor’s smartphone. A more sophisticated use case might be software that collects data from X-rays and CT scans to create 3D models, which can then be used to develop a patient treatment plan. Yet for all the usefulness of SaMDs in theory – it’s not for nothing that industry leaders like Pfizer are investing heavily in medical software – regulation has typically been a barrier to their versatility. In large part, this can be understood by the very name ‘Software as a Medical Device’. Sometimes framed by regulators as fundamentally similar to their physical cousins, Dr Zuzanna Marciniak-Nuqui, an analyst at RAND Europe, suggests that this unsubtle approach has left SaMD providers struggling to exploit the inherent benefits software can offer. And despite being what Nick Fahy, a third RAND expert, calls a “moving target” – meaning they can easily be updated, hardly news to anyone who’s used an app before – older regulations have tended to treat software as rigidly as a hip replacement. Combined with other challenges, notably around trying to squeeze software into the long-standing regulatory frameworks initially developed for hardware, it’s perhaps unsurprising that Stephen Gilbert, professor of Medical Device Regulatory Science at the Else Kröner Fresenius Center, Dresden Technical University, should say that older SaMD regulations are less “flexible” than they might be. All
Medical Device Developments /
www.nsmedicaldevices.com
the same, it’d be wrong to imply that SaMDs don’t need any regulatory oversight whatsoever. As Marciniak- Nuqui says, some researchers argue that software errors relate to many preventable health problems. This intuitively makes sense: lose a patient’s data, or code an algorithm in such a way that it recommends the wrong dosage, and the consequences could be serious. Nor is this merely a hunch. In a 2017 study, five electronic medical record systems were recalled in the US after it was uncovered that they displayed the medical information of the wrong patients, among other errors.
Flexibility and security
Given these twin tensions – unleashing the power of SaMDs while preserving patient safety – how should regulators proceed? The FDA’s so-called Digital Health Software Precertification (Pre-Cert) programme may offer an answer. First announced in 2019, the FDA released its final report on their clinical decision support software in September 2022 – and Gilbert is clearly pleased with the results. “There’s an interesting and nuanced position,” he argues, suggesting that it’s “pro-innovation and certainly pro-development.” What, then, does the Pre-Cert programme offer SaMDs? In effect, it removes the ‘medical device’ label from many medical software products – along the way freeing them from the excruciating regulatory rules developers have had to follow until now.
How the FDA decides which medical software comes under their classification of ‘non-device’ speaks elegantly to the way in which regulators are balancing flexibility and security. For one thing, the software can’t be used in an emergency, but must rather provide supportive advice – which may enhance doctors’ decision making, and therefore patient’s health, but isn’t strictly necessary to take lifesaving actions. From there, the ‘non-device’ software can’t use AI to analyse images, nor should it create a situation where a doctor unthinkingly follows what the technology says as
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For the FDA to classify a SaMD product as a non- device it must generate insights that help doctors’ make decisions, but cannot make decisions about patient care itself.
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