FDA seeks public comment regarding four-year strategic priority document

 

The agency identified four core mission goals and objectives, to include enhancing oversight of FDA-regulated products; improving and safeguarding access to FDA-regulated products in an effort to benefit health; promoting better informed decisions about the use of FDA-regulated products; and strengthening organizational excellence and accountability. 

 

Among the FDA's objectives in enhancing oversight, the agency will be seeking to strengthen detection and surveillance of problems with FDA-regulated products. "The FDA is working closely with domestic and international partners to increase information-sharing  and enhance collaborations on compliance and training efforts to expand the collective safety net," the agency wrote. The agency also is looking to expand its postmarket surveillance of products by using more active surveillance tools versus passive tools. "For example, the Sentinel Initiative is a proactive system that complements existing systems that FDA has in place to track reports of adverse events linked to the use of our regulated products. The system enables FDA to actively query diverse automated healthcare data holders — like electronic health record systems, administrative and insurance claims databases and registries — to evaluate possible medical product safety issues quickly and securely, while maintaining the privacy of patients."

 

And in an effort to improve access to FDA-regulated medicines, the agency is looking to speed up the approval process. "Although FDA has made tremendous strides in recent years in the review of new drugs, and now leads the world in both timeliness and quantity of significant new drugs approved for marketing, in the past decade, the overall development of some products crucial to public health, such as antibiotics, has slowed significantly," the agency noted. The agency acknowledged that the current costs associated with drug development may serve as a barrier to investment, especially among specialty medicines. "If biomedical science is to deliver on its promise, scientific creativity and effort must also focus on improving the medical product development process itself, with the explicit goal of robust development pathways that are efficient and predictable and result in products that are safe, effective and available to patients."