In this episode of the Diagnosing Health Care Podcast:  In the past decade, certified electronic health records (EHRs) have been instrumental in transforming medical records from paper to digital formats.

What obstacles are currently preventing providers from sharing patient data with each other or patients from sharing health information from their personal devices with their providers? In this episode of our special series on interoperability, hear from Tomaž Gornik, founder and CEO of Better.

On June 29, 2022, the Los Angeles City Council (“Council”) approved an ordinance that would raise the minimum wage for people working at “covered healthcare facilities” in the city of Los Angeles (“City”) to $25 per hour.

Recalls have always been a bit of a double-edged sword.  Obviously, companies hate recalls because a recall means their products are defective in some manner, potentially putting users at risk and damaging the brand.  They are also expensive to execute.  But a lack of recalls can also be a problem, if the underlying quality issues still exist but the companies are simply not conducting recalls.  Recalls are necessary and appropriate in the face of quality problems.

Thus, in terms of metrics, medical device companies should not adopt as a goal reducing recalls, as that will lead to behavior that could put users at risk by leaving bad products on the market.  Instead, the goal should be to reduce the underlying quality problems that might trigger the need for recall.

What are those underlying quality problems?  To help medical device manufacturers focus on the types of quality problems that might force them to conduct a recall, we have used the FDA recall database to identify the most common root causes sorted by the clinical area for the medical device.

In two recent memoranda, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) made changes to previously issued survey guidance related to COVID-19 vaccination issues.

The U.S. Supreme Court is expected to imminently issue its opinion in the case Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization (“Dobbs”). If the Court rules in a manner to overturn Roe v. Wade, states will have discretion in determining how to regulate abortion services.^[1] Such a ruling would overturn nearly 50 years of precedent, leaving patients, reproductive health providers, health plans, pharmacies, and may other stakeholders to navigate a host of uncharted legal issues. Specifically, stakeholders will likely need to untangle the web of cross-state legal issues that may emerge.

Most companies want to avoid FDA warning letters.  To help medical device companies identify violations that might lead to a warning letter, this post will dive deeply into which specific types of violations are often found in warning letters that FDA issues.

Background

As you probably know, FDA has a formal process for evaluating inspection records and other materials to determine whether issuing a warning letter is appropriate.  Those procedures can be found in chapter 4 of FDA’s Regulatory Procedures Manual.  Section 4-1-10 of that chapter requires that warning letters include specific legal citations, in addition to plain English explanations of violations.  The citations are supposed to make reference to both the statute and any applicable regulations.

As a consequence, to understand the content of the warning letters, we need to search for both statutory references as well as references to regulations.  Because statutes are deliberately drafted to be broader in their language, references to the regulations tend to be more meaningful.

How can health care employers use non-competes and other restrictive covenants to protect trade secrets? Attorneys Erik Weibust and Katherine Rigby explore the options available to employers, in an article for Law360.

In this episode of the Diagnosing Health Care Podcast:  What challenges are providers likely to face as the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) prepares its permanent COVID-19 standard for health care workers?

Attorneys Denise Dadika, Bob O’Hara, and Tim Murphy review the provisions of OSHA’s temporary COVID-19 standard for health care workers and what’s expected to change under the permanent rules. They also discuss how the agency’s current enforcement push is impacting health care providers.

Since the passage of the Medical Device Amendments of 1976, FDA has regulated in vitro diagnostic (IVD) tests as medical devices, subject to a full suite of FDA requirements.  During that time, FDA has also asserted that it has the authority to regulate in-house tests developed and performed by CLIA-certified, high-complexity clinical laboratories (generally referred to as laboratory-developed tests or LDTs) but chose as a matter of enforcement discretion not to regulate LDTs.  Over time, the Agency chipped away slowly at LDT enforcement discretion, carving out certain kinds of tests (e.g., direct-to-consumer LDTs) and thus making them subject to regulation, but by and large did not take broad steps to regulate LDTs.

Establishing and maintaining effective systems to protect sensitive personal data and confidential business information from outside interference while also assuring that privacy interests are protected is among an organization’s highest priorities. Our security and privacy team at Epstein Becker & Green has written extensively about the guidance and best practices issued by federal and state regulatory and enforcement agencies. Execution, monitoring and continually updating these preventive practices define an organization’s first line of defense. But what happens in the event that an organization actually suffers a breach? Is there guidance that might be available, particularly to healthcare organizations, to deal with continuity and disaster planning (BC/DR) directed towards assuring resilience and recovery in the event of a potentially-disastrous cyberattack?