The Advanced Medical Technology Association has just released a set of “Guiding Principles for Direct to Consumer Device Advertising. “ The principles are intended to help assure that patients have accurate and meaningful information about health care treatment options and encourage them to speak with their physician. Direct-to-consumer (DTC) advertising can be an important tool for educating patients about advanced medical technologies, which are making life better for patients through faster recovery and better outcomes and in many cases, reducing health care costs.

The Advanced Medical Technology Association (AdvaMed) is the world’s largest
association representing manufacturers of medical devices, diagnostic products, and
medical information systems. AdvaMed members and subsidiaries manufacture nearly
90 percent of the health care technology products purchased annually in the United
States and more than 50 percent of the health care technologies purchased annually
around the world.

The voluntary guidelines contain 13 principles that support compliance with the Food and Drug Administration’s and Federal Trade Commission’s existing direct-to-consumer regulations. They also include additional principles, which include revising or withdrawing ads when new safety-risk information comes to light; excluding any content designed to minimize risk information; educating healthcare professionals about new products or new-use indications before the launch of an ad campaign; and submitting TV ads for restricted devices to the FDA at the time of an ad’s release.

The principles were not an effort to ward off regulation from Congress and the new Administration, but to respond to concerns that have been raised in the media in recent months about some DTC ads.

Readers of MassTortDefense know that plaintiffs try to make an issue of DTC advertising in failure to warn claims, and have succeeded in some contexts in having DTC advertising undermine the traditional learned intermediary rule.

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