The Record

For well over a decade the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has been told that its framework for regulating traditional medical devices is not modern or flexible enough to address increasingly novel digital health technologies. Very recently, however, the FDA introduced a series of digital health initiatives that represent important experiments in medical product regulation, departing from longstanding precedents applied to therapeutic products like drugs and devices.

The ‘Revised Common Rule’ took effect on January 21, 2019, marking the first change since 2005 to the federal regulation that governs human subjects research conducted with federal support or in federally supported institutions. The Common Rule had required informed consent before researchers could collect and use identifiable personal health information.

What does it mean to give professional advice, and how do things change when various forms of technology, such as decision-support software or predictive advice-generating algorithms, are inserted into the process of professional advicegiving? Professional advice is valuable to clients because of the asymmetry between lay and expert knowledge where professionals have knowledge that their clients lack. But technology is increasingly changing the traditional process of professional advice-giving.