Every week, MedCity News highlights the best of its MedCitizens: syndication partners and MedCity News readers who discuss life science current events on MedCityNews.com.

Now here’s the best of what YOU had to say:

Should Nurses Provide Spiritual Care and Support to Patients? “The goal of the professional nurse should involve healing the whole person, not just the immediate and tangible physical ailments of the patient. Because of the intangible nature of spirituality, expression of this need by patients may go unnoticed in a clinical setting, especially if the nurse is untrained in providing for this fundamental need in whole patient treatment.”

Storage costs of electronic health records surprisingly low. “One controversial item was my conclusion that the storage costs per patient to retain data are insignificant. Here’s the calculation.”

FDA data on failed medical devices, drugs may be released. “Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Margaret Hamburg told the Food and Drug Law Institute’s annual conference that the agency is considering opening the files on failed drug and device products to rival firms and independent researchers. This is a long-overdue change that would improve the efficiency of research and development.”

Medical device firms do many clinical studies offshore. Here’s why. “Many, if not most, medical device companies perform pilot clinical studies outside of the U.S. Cost reductions, avoiding a protracted FDA Investigational Device Exemption (IDE) approval process, and the ability to make design changes during the study without continual IDE amendments are the leading reasons to perform early studies outside the U.S (OUS).”

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