Registrar Corp.
Medical device manufacturers and importers are required to report “adverse events” to FDA when their device has caused or contributed to death or serious injury. An adverse event is when a device has a malfunction that could cause death or serious injury. Importers report this information to the manufacturer. The FDA has announced that it will update certain codes used for Adverse Event Reporting through the Electronic Medical Device Reporting (eMDR) system on April 6, 2018.
The Agency will replace the codes for FDA Device Problem, Manufacturer Evaluation Method, Manufacturer Evaluation Result, and Manufacturer Evaluation Conclusion with similar codes established by the International Medical Device Regulators Forum (IMDRF).
IMDRF has released public references to help map FDA codes to the new codes during the interim before the update. For example, the current FDA Device Problem Code 2682 refers to an “issue associated with the interaction between the patient’s physiology or anatomy and the device that affects patient and/or device.” This code corresponds to and will be replaced by IMDRF code A0101, a “problem associated with the interaction between the patient’s physiology or anatomy and the device that affects the patient and/or the device.”
Despite this mapping, reporting parties will not be able to rely on FDA codes after the update. Some IMDRF codes do not have a current FDA equivalent, and FDA has further stated that the submission of retired FDA codes following the update will be rejected by the eMDR system. As such, reporting parties should familiarize themselves with the IMDRF codes for a smooth transition into these changes.
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