The long-drawn out drama on the FDA’s endlessly pending (July 2011) final regulations on the approval procedure of mobile health apps seems to be coming to a crescendo with next week’s US House of Representatives Energy and Commerce Committee hearings. There are missed deadlines, unanswered questions, reports due, an apparent repositioning of mobile apps as ‘health IT’, the involvement of an alphabet soup of agencies–Health and Human Services (HHS), the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and, most importantly the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information (ONC) under HHS, which seems to be breaking away and asserting control in the FDA vacuum. Cheering on ONC for dominance are health IT companies such as McKesson and perhaps some members of the Committee. This apparent lassitude on FDA’s part is certainly odd, as according to Mobihealthnews, the FDA has already approved 75 mobile medical apps. Brian Dolan over there has done fine work on sorting out this ‘who’s on first?‘–and why–situation in two articles, Republicans, EHR vendors want ONC to take over medical app regulation (14 Mar) and Congress asks FDA if “actual use” is factor in medical app regulation (6 Mar).
Related TTA: The mHealth road map, as drawn by the FCC and Adding another chef to the government regulation kitchen
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