An evaluation of a distributed medical device safety surveillance system: the DELTA network study.

BACKGROUND: Post-market medical product safety surveillance is a complex task requiring standardized data collection, prompt adverse event reporting mechanisms and appropriate methodologies to identify low frequency safety threats and risk communication.
PURPOSE: To review the design of the DELTA (Data Extraction and Longitudinal Trend Analysis) network study of the medical device safety surveillance.
METHODS: This is a multicenter prospective observational study designed to evaluate the safety of new cardiovascular devices used during percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) performed through continuous analysis of the routinely collected American College of Cardiology-National Cardiovascular Data Registry (ACC-NCDR) data elements. The primary endpoint of the study is detection of adverse event rates specific to several classes of new medical devices, including drug eluting coronary stents, embolic protection devices, and vascular closure devices in patients undergoing PCI. Secondary endpoints include the time-savings between the DELTA network detection of a true device safety alert and the time taken to detect the same outcome using conventional retrospective data analysis, overall sensitivity, specificity, positive predictive value and negative predictive value of the DELTA network surveillance system.
RESULTS: The details of the study are described including system design, eligibility criteria, methods and components of data collection, data security and statistical methods. In addition, the methods of adjudication and verification following an adverse event alert, overall study outcomes, end points, limitations and potential advantages are discussed.
CONCLUSION: This report describes the first multicenter prospective study of a computerized safety surveillance system to monitor and evaluate the safety of new cardiovascular devices.