The Food & Drug Administration today launched a rating system for its organizational performance.
The federal watchdog agency’s new system, “FDA-TRACK,” is designed to meet President Barack Obama’s attempts to make the U.S. government more transparent and collaborative, with more public participation. The acronym stands for transparency, results, accountability, credibility and knowledge-sharing.
The performance tracker will allow the agency and the public to monitor more than 100 FDA program offices through data collected from annually established "key performance measures" set by those offices, according to the agency.
The FDA said the data collected will be reported on a monthly basis and the agency’s senior managers will present analysis of the data about their own departments to the FDA’s leadership on a quarterly basis.
The medical device industry will be paying close attention to the Center for Devices and Radiological Health’s device application review, a process which the 2002 Medical Device User Fee and Modernization Act was designed to speed up. The FDA was tasked with meeting performance goals under MDUFMA, which set benchmarks for measuring improvements in the agency’s review times, and established user fees for device companies. The agency is holding a workshop on those fees Sept. 14.
As part of its ongoing transparency campaign, the FDA launched a new transparency website for the CDRH to provide information on medical devices and radiation-emitting products last April.
