Software Process Improvement to assist Medical Device Software Development Organisations to comply with the amendments to the Medical Device Directive (original) (raw)
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How amendments to the Medical Device Directive affect the Development of Medical Device Software
A recent revision to the European Medical Device Directive (MDD 2007/47/EC) made fourteen amendments to the original directive (93/42/EEC). A number of these changes directly affect the de-velopment of software for use in healthcare. The most significant change in relation to medical device software development is that standalone software is now seen as an active medical device. Prior to this amendment medical device software was developed in accordance with the IEC 62304 standard. However, IEC 62304 is not sufficiently comprehensive to provide guidance in the development of standalone software as an active medical device. Medi SPICE is currently being developed to fill the gaps left by IEC 62304 in developing standalone software as an active medical device and to provide medical device software developers a single point of reference for developing software for use in healthcare.
Development of MDevSPICE® - the medical device software process assessment framework
Journal of Software: Evolution and Process, 2015
Software that is incorporated into a medical device, or which is a standalone medical device in its own right, is of a safety critical nature and subject to regulation from various jurisdictions. In order to satisfy jurisdictional regulations, developers of medical device software adopt standards and guidance provided by international standards bodies and regulators. However, the various standards and guidance documents are often not developed as a single cohesive set resulting in a complex and costly challenge for medical device software developers when complying with regulation. The aim of this paper is to describe the integration of medical device guidance documents and software engineering standards into a unified framework for medical device software process assessment called MDevSPICE®. The paper illustrates the development of both the process reference model and the process assessment model (PAM) of MDevSPICE®. The MDevSPICE® PAM can help software developers to prepare for the regulatory audits, which they must satisfy as a prerequisite to placing their products on the market. The MDevSPICE® PAM can also assist medical device manufacturers to select competent software suppliers.
Development of a Process Assessment Model for Medical Device Software Development
Software that is incorporated into a medical device, or which is a standalone medical device in its own right, is of a safety critical nature and subject to regulation from various jurisdictions (principally the EU and the US). In order to satisfy jurisdictional regulations, developers of medical device software generally implement standards and guidance provided by international standards bodies and national administrative departments. However, the various standards and guidance documents are not developed as a single cohesive set but often as separate resources addressing distinct areas of concern. The result for medical device software developers is that integration of these various sources represents a challenging undertaking. The aim of this paper is to describe the integration of the several process models and regulatory standards, first, into a process reference model and then into a process assessment model for medical device software development. The focus is on the integration of regulatory standards from the medical device domain with generic software development process models, resulting in a unified best practice framework for medical device software development. The process reference model for medical device software development is going to be published this year as IEC TR 80002-3, and the process assessment model for medical device software development is currently being validated through pilot studies in medical device industry. This best practice framework will help small software developers in their adoption of regulations-compliant best practices while reducing the overhead associated with understanding the long list of regulations and standards they need to adhere to when developing software for medical devices. This framework will also help the manufacturers in selecting their software suppliers assuring that the suppliers have adopted the best practices and are compliant with the medical device standards and regulations.
Envisioning a Requirements Specification Template for Medical Device Software
Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2014
In many health jurisdictions, software is considered to be medical device software (MDS), when it is used to analyze patient data in order to render a diagnosis or monitor the patient's health; when it is to be used by a patient to diagnose an ailment; or when it is used to deliver functionality for a medical device. Flaws in MDS can result in patient harm, including death. Legislators and regulatory agencies publish guidelines and regulatory standards that are aimed at ensuring the safety, security and dependability of MDS. These guidelines and standards universally agree that a complete and consistent requirement specification is vital to the success of medical device software. Moreover, we observe that regulators are shifting from being process focused to being product focused in their approval guidance. In this paper, we review challenges associated with requirements used in the development of MDS, current standards and guidelines relevant to MDS, and existing templates for requirement specifications. We then propose a set of design objectives for a 'good' MDS requirements template and propose a template structure for MDS requirement specification fulfilling all the design objectives. Our template is, by design, tailored to facilitate the gathering and documenting of high quality requirements for MDS.
Medical device software: defining key terms
2016
INTRODUCTION one of the areas of significant growth in medical devices has been the role of software - as an integral component of a medical device, as a standalone device and more recently as applications on mobile devices. The risk related to a malfunction of the standalone software used within healthcare is in itself not a criterion for its qualification or not as a medical device. It is therefore, necessary to clarify some criteria for the qualification of stand-alone software as medical devices Materials and methods: Ukrainian, European Union, United States of America legislation, Guidelines developed by European Commission and Food and Drug Administration's, recommendations represented by international voluntary group and scientific works. This article is based on dialectical, comparative, analytic, synthetic and comprehensive research methods. CONCLUSION the legal regulation of software which is used for medical purpose in Ukraine limited to one definition. In European Un...
The Significance of Requirements in Medical Device Software Development
2013
Software to be used in or as a medical device is subject to user requirements. However, unlike unregulated software, medical device software must meet both the user's requirements and the requirements of the regulatory body of the region into which the software will be marketed. Regulatory requirements are fixed and can be planned for; unfortunately, the same is not true with user requirements. As many medical device software development organisations are following traditional sequential Software Development Life Cycles (SDLC), they are experiencing difficulties accommodating changes in requirements once development has begun. Agile methods and practices offer the ability to overcome the challenges associated with following a sequential SDLC. Whilst the regulatory requirements are fixed, this paper presents these requirements and shows how they appear to mandate the use of a sequential SDLC. This paper also explains how agile methods and practices can be successfully adopted in the development of medical device software without hindering the process of achieving regulatory approval.
Addressing Regulatory Requirements In Medical Device Software Systems
Regulatory requirements are an indispensable part of Medical device related software systems as those systems are safety critical and its failure can be life threatening. For this reason, the medical device software systems must be reliable and must maintain international standards and regulations. As a result Regulatory Requirement is generally held responsible for the certification or license of the software as it imposes constraints and regulations on both the system and the organization. Since most of the systems are looking forward to automation applying Artificial Intelligence and machine learning techniques, these systems should adhere to strict law and order. But, due to the natural language created ambiguity, conflicts, informal definition and lack of understanding regarding this particular type of requirement resulted in frequent failure. And so business entrepreneurs of modern time put much emphasis on Regulatory requirements management to avoid law suit. Therefore, researchers are developing many new frameworks and methodologies to apply Regulatory requirements in medical device related systems. This paper discusses on the researches regarding the modern approach to address Regulatory requirements for safety critical medical device software. The results of this analysis can serve the research communities to understand problems regarding the topic, the parallel activities and their interrelation to reach a better solution, and future trend of interest for the researchers on Regulatory requirements.
2021
Caring for a child in life-threatening distress is very stressful and error-prone for the caregivers. An end-user need for a software that would free the child from human error and support the caregivers in the care of the child has thus emerged. Free from the time-consuming and stressful constraints of calculating constants or medication doses and consulting emergency protocols, caregivers could be more available and focused on the vital care of the child. The extension of the scope of medical devices to software for medical purposes is one of the important new points of the future European regulations. The very important overhaul of the previous classification system with the addition of new rules or updating of old ones reinforces the regulations applicable to software. The impact is considerable for the development and market access strategy of highrisk classified software, and participate in a better security and efficacy of the marketed products, for better healthcare. In this...
Standalone Software as an Active Medical Device
Software Process Improvement and …, 2011
With the release of the latest European Medical Device Directive (MDD) standalone software can now be classified as an active medical device. Consequently the methods used to ensure device safety and reliability needs to be reviewed. IEC 62304 is the current software development lifecycle framework followed by medical device software developers but important processes are beyond the scope of IEC 62304. These processes are covered by additional standards. However since the MDD became mandatory these additional standards are not comprehensive enough to ensure the reliability of an active medical device consisting of only software. By employing software process improvement techniques this software can be developed and validated to ensure it performs the required task in a safe and reliable way.