FDA

At some point, all of us are likely to owe our lives--or our quality of life--to a medical device. Yesterday I had the chance to attend the third annual Medical Device Connectivity conference, where manufacturers, doctors, and administrators discussed how to get all these monitors, pumps, and imaging machines to work together for better patient care. Read More »

Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) appeal mostly to statisticians and researchers whose careers depend on access to data. But these programming tools are also a useful part of a Web that is becoming increasingly supple and sophisticated. I have written a series of articles about the use of APIs to share and run analytics on patient data, but today I’ll cover a cool use of an API developed by the Department of Health and Human Services for disseminating educational material. The locus for this activity started with the wealth of information created by the Centers for Disease Control for doctors, public health workers, and the general public. Striving to help the public understand vaccinations, West Nile fever, Ebola (when that was a major publicissue), and even everyday conditions such as diabetes, the CDC realized they had to make their content simple to embed in web sites for allthose audiences.

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I read an interesting article in the Economist’s Technology Quarterly of June 2nd-8th of 2012, p. 17-18, on open source medical devices software. Let me summarise for you: the article starts by showing all the benefits of medical devices software that is developed using open source models, and there are many...The article concludes however that open source has no place in the current regulatory environment and points only to FDA regulation for that conclusion. Read More »

Studies show that mobile medical devices, such as the ability to recieve dialysis at home for kidney disease patients, could save as much as $197 billion over the next 25 years while improving patient care. Read More »

The Food and Drug Administration is in the market for a data mining tool that will gather information on adverse reactions to vaccines and other drugs, according to solicitation documents posted Monday. Read More »

General Dynamics Corp. has closed its $960 million acquisition of Vangent Inc. in a move that builds out GD’s health care IT business. The company becomes part of General Dynamics IT and creates a health care business that stretches across both civilian and defense agencies. Read More »

At the Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit, pharmacists are using old-fashioned paper spreadsheets to track their stock of drugs in short supply – a task that takes several hours each day...A few hundred medicines make the list of drugs in short supply: anesthetics, drugs for nausea and nutrition, infection treatments and diarrhea pills. A separate list has scarce cancer drugs for leukemia or breast cancer.
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