Outside the operating room—economic, regulatory, and legal challenges
Panel discussion
Moderated by Lawrence K. Altman, MD
Dr. Lawrence Altman: Let us start by opening the discussion to the audience.
Comment from audience: Considerable discussion has focused on the conflict between regulation and innovation, but I find very little evidence that such a conflict actually exists. It was pointed out that the United States is by far the biggest producer and user of medical devices and has been since World War II. Economists estimate that 50% of the growth of the US economy since then has resulted directly from innovations in science and technology. During that same period, the regulatory apparatus—including the FDA—has vastly expanded. Apparently, innovation has not been stifled by regulation but actually seems to thrive in a regulated environment.
I speak often with venture capitalists who finance science technology. They know this history, and they know that regulation is inevitable. Rather than opposing it, they want clarity about regulation. For instance, many of them avoid financing human embryonic stem cell research because the rules around it are not clear, owing to the stigma and political controversy surrounding it.
Michael Mussallem: You make great points. People who invest in medical innovation would like an idea of the rules before they make investment decisions. And good, solid regulation—such as when the FDA pushes companies for the kind of science and evidence needed to clear a hurdle—is absolutely appropriate. But as regulation increases, the time and costs to bring an innovation to market increase. At the moment, the innovation equation is fragile. When too many obstacles are put in the way, the risk of failure becomes too high.
Keep in mind that the success rate in innovation is low. Although I have been in this field my entire career, it would be much easier for me to hit a major league fastball than it is to successfully innovate in medical technology. We are wrong many more times than we are right. For every success, there may be 9 failures, or 19 failures, or even 99 failures.
Rebecca Dresser: I agree that regulation sometimes does not effectively advance its goal. When that is the case, I think we need to be willing to negotiate rather than condemn; we need to show where regulation is not meeting agreed-upon goals (such as protecting patients) and figure out how to reach those goals more efficiently.
We also should keep in mind the cliché, “If professions do not adequately self-regulate, external regulation will come in.” Perhaps that is what has happened. Professionals need to self-examine and organizations need to develop voluntary standards to help avoid stupid regulation.
Christopher White: We need to be mindful of the unique relationships that we have within this niche sector of the health care industry. Issues that might not appear to threaten us directly may have unanticipated implications. Some of the barriers that regulation can impose may not be immediately perceptible and can be masked by otherwise beneficial public policies. For example, we now have a patent reform debate on Capitol Hill promoted by the information technology industry as pro-innovation, but in the context of the life sciences industry, many of the proposed patent reforms threaten innovation by devaluing device improvements.
Also, much of the regulation the device industry confronts is responsive to dynamics in the pharmaceutical industry. For example, one house of the Massachusetts legislature recently passed a bill that would ban gifts to health care professionals and require licensure of pharmaceutical and device sales representatives who work in the state. The term “gift” is defined very broadly and could include not only meals and the other things that we read about regularly but also rebates, educational grants, and training. [Editor’s note: A modified version of this legislation was signed by Massachusetts’ governor in August 2008 and will take effect January 1, 2009.]
Question from audience: As a practicing surgeon, I think the major problem lies in the area of off-label use. If one accepts that the device manufacturer is well-intentioned and living up to the AdvaMed code of ethics, the system falls apart once the device has cleared the hurdle of FDA approval for a labeled indication. The product then reaches the broad market, where it is subject to commission-based sales. Whether or not to use the device in innovative ways is generally at the discretion of the physician, until it reaches the threshold of research and institutional review board approval. We have virtually no post-market surveillance by the manufacturer. At what point is the manufacturer culpable for the off-label use of its product when patients are harmed and no surveillance exists until enough casualties occur that the problem becomes obvious?
Mr. Mussallem: Put yourself in the shoes of a physician who is facing a difficult situation that has not been studied and is outside the realm of any approved, “on-label” therapies. A classic case is for children with congenital heart defects. Since no one advances a medical device for such small patient populations, physicians treating such cases are forced to be creative. They take devices that were intended and tested for adults and apply them to a child. Do you punish those physicians? Do you punish the company that created the devices?
When you look at the question down at this level, where it becomes quite practical and quite personal, the issue of off-label use takes on a different color. In many ways, it comes down to how much we trust physicians and to what extent we think they should be regulated. I would want to give physicians the freedom to try to do what is best for their patients and to use their judgment to apply a device in a different way—one that they understand has not been tested or approved for that use. But I would also want transparency: I would want them to explain to the patient (or the parents) what is known and unknown about the situation. It is in the absence of that transparency that you enter dangerous ground.
Paul Lombardo: When a new law is passed or a new regulation comes down, it is usually in response to a scandal: something bad enough happened to scare everyone to death. If I were advising industry, I would tell them to go to any length to avoid the kind of scandals that we have seen that challenge the trust of the public. So I agree that transparency is critical. It is one thing to say, “I am trying to do what is best for my patients and trying new things because I do not have access to tools especially designed for children.” But when we find out that a doctor or a manufacturer has hidden data about a method of using equipment that has never been approved, and is covertly pushing that use, the predictable result is that somebody will want to regulate it.
Ms. Dresser: Of course, malpractice suits are an option, but they will cover only a few cases, generally the most extreme ones. I think the greatest need is for information gathering. The medical profession should think about how to encourage data collection for off-label use so that problems can be detected earlier than they are now. This type of data collection is also in device manufacturers’ best interest, as it helps to avoid scandal.
Another approach is to extend the patent exclusivity of products whose manufacturers conduct trials in underserved patient populations, thus providing a financial incentive to do such studies. This approach has in fact been adopted in the case of pediatric trials and for orphan diseases. Interestingly, some pediatric trials prompted by this patent extension incentive have shown that certain medications or dosages previously accepted as standard medical practice turned out to be harmful in children once they were formally studied.
Dr. Altman: What about proposals to use published literature—which also is subject to abuse—as a criterion for off-label use?
Ms. Dresser: Peer-reviewed journals do not have access to raw data, which can be manipulated in a lot of ways, so they cannot completely substitute for FDA review. Recent articles in JAMA addressed these concerns.21,22
Comment from audience: There seems to be a misguided desire to look to our regulatory agencies to tell us how we should manage a patient. As a practicing surgeon who does minimally invasive procedures, I never look to regulatory agencies to tell me what the optimal therapy is for a patient; rather, I look to them to tell me whether a product is a therapeutic option for a patient, and then I use my judgment to decide whether it is the best option for this particular patient.
Consider how Britain’s National Institute for Clinical Excellence (NICE) has approached drug-eluting stents. They looked specifically at off-label uses of these stents and determined that the stents confer a benefit in these off-label areas, based on subgroup analysis. But then they did a cost-effectiveness analysis and determined that the benefit was not great enough to offset the cost to society based on the quality-adjusted life-years gained. Well, that may be a fine theoretical discussion, but when I am sitting in front of a 75-year-old who I think will do better with a particular device, it is hard to be concerned about whether it is on label or off label, or does or does not meet cost-effectiveness criteria.
Mr. Mussallem: This comes back to the trust that we have in our physicians. Should product manufacturers be allowed to hand out peer-reviewed journal articles? If physicians are provided with those articles, does that provide too much information for them and steer them inappropriately? Well, if physicians single-mindedly made such articles the sole basis for a treatment pattern, then it absolutely would be inappropriate, but we should give physicians a little bit of credit. Their job is to take a tremendous amount of data—everything that they have learned through their own experiences, plus journal articles and other sources—and apply it to design the best course of treatment they can for a specific patient.
If we try to overprescribe how a physician behaves, we will find it is too complex to regulate or legislate from the top. We should have a lighter hand and design incentives appropriately so that physicians are first and foremost motivated to take care of the patient. We should not try to tell them too much about exactly how to practice; after all, a large study that finds that one treatment has a 62% chance of being superior does not prove that it is the best treatment for a specific patient. You always want to preserve physician judgment.
Dr. Peter Ubel: I agree, but if we are to avoid overmanaging the day-today decisions that doctors make, we doctors also have to think more broadly about our responsibilities. If our duty is only to the patient in front of us, we can ignore being told that a treatment offers only a very small benefit for the cost. If we doctors say that it is not our job to be mindful of costs, then somebody is eventually going to have the job of telling us when we can and cannot use those stents, as a way to rein in costs because no one can afford insurance anymore.
For physicians to maintain more room for our judgment in influencing clinical practice, we have to remember that we are stewards not just of individual patients but of the general health care system. The cost of technology plays a huge role in driving up the cost of medical care.
