Strong ethics medicine: best practice COI policies for academic medical centers

In the universe of conflicts of interest, perhaps none are more significant – and worthy of study…. and action – than are those  involving doctors and health care industry (e.g., pharma, medical devices) companies.

On the one hand,  these types of conflicts are widely recognized to be very damaging.  Indeed, when I last compiled my largest  federal corporate criminal  fine list, three of the top four  cases of all time involved such COIs (though with a new entrant  to be added to this list  –   the SAC insider trading case – one should now say three of the top five).  On the other hand, this is one of the few areas where there is actually research to show that  good policies can in fact mitigate conflicts – as described in this earlier post. 

But that raises the question: what constitutes a best practice policy?

A new and useful resource in that regard is  this recently published article from Compliance Today by friend of the COI Blog Bill Sacks of HCCS,  which is based on a study issued by the Pew Charitable Trust late last year on best practice COI policies for academic medical centers. While most readers of this blog (to my knowledge) do not work in the health care area, C&E practitioners of all types (or others who are COI aficionados) might be interested in this case study of what strong COI-related mitigation can look like, and find useful ideas in it for dealing with COIs in their own respective fields.