New regulations for medical devices: Rationale, advances and impact on research and patient care

A series of events relating to inferior medical devices has brought about changes in the legal requirements regarding quality control on the part of regulators. Apart from clinical studies, register and routine data will play an essential role in this context. To ensure adequate use of these data, adapted methodologies are required as register data in fact represent a new scientific entity. For the interpretation of register and routine data several limitations of published data should be taken into account. In many cases essential parameters of study cohorts - such as age, comorbidities, the patients' risk profiles or the hospital profile - are not presented. Required data and evaluation procedures differ significantly, for example, between hip and spine implants. A "one fits for all" methodology is quite unlikely to exist and vigorous efforts will be required to develop suitable standards in the next future. The new legislation will affect all high-risk products, besides joint implants also contact lenses, cardiac pacemakers or stents, for example, the new regulations can markedly enhance product quality monitoring. Register data and clinical studies should not be considered as competitors, they complement each other when used responsibly. In the future follow-up studies should increasingly focus on specific questions, while global follow-up investigations regarding product complication rates and surgical methods will increasingly be covered by registers.