Posts Tagged ‘health-cost’

The red tape challenge

Posted in Accountable Care Organizations, Advanced Drug Manufacturing Technology, Affordable Care Act, Bio Instrumentation in Experimental Life Sciences Research, Biological Networks, Gene Regulation and Evolution, Biomarkers & Medical Diagnostics, Biomedical Measurement Science, Drug Delivery Platform Technology, Ecosystems & Industrial Concentration in the Medical Device Sector, FDA Regulatory Affairs, FDA, CE Mark & Global Regulatory Affairs: process management and strategic planning - GCP, GLP, ISO 14155, Federal Budget Appropriations, Health Economics and Outcomes Research, Health Law & Patient Safety, Healthcare costs and reimbursement, HealthCare IT, Healthcare Reform, ISO 10993 for Product Registration: FDA & CE Mark for Development of Medical Devices and Diagnostics, Medical Devices R&D and Inventions, Medicare and Medicaid, Regulated Clinical Trials: Design, Methods, Components and IRB related issues, Technology Capital Expenses, tagged cost, drugs, FDA, health-cost, managing cost and quality, Medical device, Pharmacovigilance, QMS, Quality system, Regulatory process improvements on December 6, 2013| Leave a Comment »

The red tape challenge

reporter and curator: Dror Nir, PhD

Large part of the time and cost for developing a new medical device or a new drug is allocated for achieving regulatory compliance. While quality and safety are desired, having to continually spend additional time and money throughout the product’s life cycle just on the proof of its quality and safety is painful to all, especially for the health systems which eventually have to pay for it.

On this issue, I bring you the following post:

It has almost become routine: under narratives of increased patient safety and improved efficiency new regulatory requirements are developed, resulting in increased requirements on the industry. The new European pharmacovigilance legislation and the upcoming European medical device regulatory updates are only two examples. Being part of the industry you have very limited impact on the regulations but have to comply with them anyway. That is – if you were to continue marketing your device or drug. Under certain circumstances the cost of meeting legal requirements is so great it may bring into question the viability of continuing certain business activities. This is especially the case for smaller companies or niche products.

It is clear, thus, that you have a huge incentive to try to achieve compliance with minimal effort. If we take a bird’s eye view on the challenge of reaching compliance, two major elements become evident:

The quality system is, in itself, a high maintenance object which consumes ongoing resources:
- It needs to be revisited often due to changes in the regulatory system or in the business environment.
- Each change may affect many components of the system and a quick modification may cause inconsistency.
- Each modification needs to be accepted, signed-off formally by several people and be disseminated via formally recorded training.
- The organization should withstand audits and inspections in regards to the quality system.
Living with the quality system: Each SOP and work instruction has to be followed, and typically forms need to be filled, signed and filed.

Young companies which are just embarking on the regulatory path often do not realize these two characteristics of the quality system. Quick fixes in the form of SOP texts copied from other organizations or generic templates are being used to get the initial certification. However, as the organization evolves it realizes that a quality system is not a one-time effort and cannot be glued on from external sources. It has to be streamlined and become part of the way that the organization lives and does business. Companies are enjoying the benefits of improved process design and automation on a large scale every day, in many areas. When recently did you see a delivery person arriving to a pickup without a Barcode reader, so that he does not need to fill any form manually? When was the last time that a software package was released without an automatic consistency check? So too your quality system and related processes may be dramatically engineered to serve you better.

Better efficiency in quality compliance should thus be achieved through careful analysis and optimization of two types of processes:

How do we better maintain the quality system? How do we make it easier to change the system, keep it consistent, train in it, etc.

The SOPs and work instructions: SOPs cannot be just imported from outside or suggested by a QA/RA consultant who does not know the organization very well. SOPs should be a true marriage between the legal and business requirements and should be the result of a careful consideration by all stakeholders. From my experience, the best SOPs are written by the process owner, with the guidance of the regulatory expert. For example: the R&D manager should be the one drafting the design control SOP, with input of the regulatory expert. Such a SOP is much more likely to fit the business needs, and also more likely to be followed by the process owner.

Yes, I realize that thinking this way is very often not what companies do when they rush compliance. I insist that this is what has to be done to achieve sustainable compliance. The good news is that, when companies do look at their quality system in this way, they see many opportunities for significant improvement. Some of those improvements are achieved through use of better IT tools. These tools would typically be in the area of document management and versioning, workflow automation, improved collaboration and electronic signatures. Like any other change, this also requires a vision and a certain effort. However, the long term business impact may be as significant as the difference between business success or failure.

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New Imaging device bears a promise for better quality control of breast-cancer lumpectomies – considering the cost impact

Posted in CANCER BIOLOGY & Innovations in Cancer Therapy, FDA Regulatory Affairs, Health Economics and Outcomes Research, Imaging-based Cancer Patient Management, Medical Devices R&D and Inventions, tagged breast cancer, breast cancer treatment, brest cancer screening in young women, Cancer - General, cancer patient management, evidence based medicine, FDA, Food and Drug Administration, free margin, health, health-cost, healthcare, lumpectomies, medicine, research, science, Technology, treatment of breast cancer on January 9, 2013| 6 Comments »

New Imaging device bears a promise for better quality control of breast-cancer lumpectomies – considering the cost impact

Author and Curator: Dror Nir, PhD

Couple of days ago I have posted on breast-cancer mammography screening and associated costs; Not applying evidence-based medicine drives up the costs of screening for breast-cancer in the USA. Treatment of breast-cancer represents much heavier cost-burden. According to the following publication: Variability in Reexcision Following Breast Conservation Surgery made in JAMA: “Failure to achieve appropriate margins at the initial operation will require additional surgery with re-excision rate estimates ranging from 30% to 60%. These additional operations can produce considerable psychological, physical, and economic stress for patients and delay use of recommended adjuvant therapies. A high percentage (10%-36%) of women requiring reexcision undergo total mastectomy. Thus, the effect of reexcision on altering a patient’s initial treatment of choice is significant.”

Considering that ~70% of the 285,000 new patients diagnosed with breast cancer each year undergoes lumpectomy, this data represents significant cost. Not to mention morbidity, stress and reduce quality of life for the patients. In my post Optical Coherent Tomography – emerging technology in cancer patient management I discussed the potential of OCT in controlling the quality of lumpectomies in-situ. A workflow that represents potential to reduce the costs of repeated lumpectomies.

Last week, Dune Medical Devices, Inc., the company that developed the MarginProbe^TM System, an intra-operative tissue assessment device to be used as accessory during lumpectomies of early-stage breast cancer, has received Premarket Approval (PMA) by the United States Food and Drug Administration.

FDA approval of the MarginProbe System was based on a 664 patient prospective, multi-center, randomized, double arm study to evaluate the effectiveness of MarginProbe in identifying cancerous tissue along the margins of removed breast tissue during initial lumpectomy procedures. MarginProbe, which uses electromagnetic “signatures” to identify healthy and cancerous tissue, was found to be over three times more effective in finding cancer on the margin during lumpectomy, compared to traditional intra-operative imaging and palpation assessment. This enabled surgeons to significantly reduce the number of patients with positive margins following initial surgery.

The following publication gives an idea on the clinical performance of MarginProbe:

“J Surg Res. 2010 May 15;160(2):277-81. doi: 10.1016/j.jss.2009.02.025. Epub 2009 Mar 31.

Diagnostic performance of a novel device for real-time margin assessment in lumpectomy specimens.

Pappo I, Spector R, Schindel A, Morgenstern S, Sandbank J, Leider LT, Schneebaum S, Lelcuk S, Karni T.

Source

Department of General Surgery, Assaf Harofeh Medical Center, Zrifin, Israel. pappo@zahav.net.il

Abstract

BACKGROUND:

Margin status in breast lumpectomy procedures is a prognostic factor for local recurrence and the need to obtain clear margins is often a cause for repeated surgical procedures. A recently developed device for real-time intraoperative margin assessment (MarginProbe; Dune Medical Devices, Caesarea, Israel), was clinically tested. The work presented here looks at the diagnostic performance of the device.

METHODS:

The device was applied to freshly excised lumpectomy and mastectomy specimens at specific tissue measurement sites. These measurement sites were accurately marked, cut out, and sent for histopathologic analysis. Device readings (positive or negative) were compared with histology findings (namely malignant, containing any microscopically detected tumor, or nonmalignant) on a per measurement site basis. The sensitivity and specificity of the device was computed for the full dataset and for additional relevant subgroups.

RESULTS:

A total of 869 tissue measurement sites were obtained from 76 patients, 753 were analyzed, of which 165 were cancerous and 588 were nonmalignant. Device performance on relatively homogeneous sites was: sensitivity 1.00 (95% CI: 0.85-1), specificity 0.87 (95% CI: 0.83-0.90). Performance for the full dataset was: sensitivity 0.70 (95% CI: 0.63-0.77), specificity 0.70 (95% CI: 0.67-0.74). Device sensitivity was estimated to change from 56% to 97% as the cancer feature size increased from 0.7 mm to 6.6 mm. Detection rate of samples containing pure DCIS clusters was not different from rates of samples containing IDC.

CONCLUSIONS:

The device has high sensitivity and specificity in distinguishing between normal and cancer tissue even down to small cancer features.

PMID: 19628225”

Imagine how cost effective breast cancer management can be if it will involve systems such as these in addition to the systems I discussed in some of my previous posts, for example: What could transform an underdog into a winner?

Written by: Dror Nir, PhD.