In the flurry of closing our May issue last week, one of the authors working with me balked.
“If I’d known you were going to ask me to sign so many forms, I wouldn’t have said yes to commenting! ”
Ok, so we felt like a faceless, inflexible bureaucracy. And, our staff duly explained --in the bureaucratic monotone of an email correspondence–why we need so many %##** forms!
One of those—the conflict of interest form—has become a familiar staple at biomedical journals, conferences, and just about every where else physician-scientists set foot. Except in their own home: Too many research institutions still have weak conflict of interest policies.
The Institute of Medicine has now joined a host of other organizations weighing in on the issue. This week they released their report on financial conflict of interest, outlining a series of recommendations for institutions, including medical colleges.
The report weighs about as much as ‘Molecular Biology of the Cell’—and its contributors seem themselves to have been thoroughly vetted for conflict of interest. Overall, its recommendations, though thorough, are perhaps not surprising. For instance, the report said that, with certain well-vetted exceptions, physicians should not participate in clinical trials in which they have a financial interest in the outcome , and professional societies should not accept direct industry funding for developing clinical guidelines.
The report also recommends that Congress pass legislation—which is being considered--that would require medical device and pharmaceutical companies to disclose publicly all payments they make to physicians. With such a database, medical colleges could make sure researchers—even ones who claim they are next to God—are being straight with them.
All of this sounds good to me. But there’s one recommendation I particularly agree with: get all the conflict of interest scolds—that includes us—on the same boat. Essentially, the report called for more uniformity in policies.
At the press conference announcing the report, committee chair Bernard Lo mused that some software developer (presumably someone ‘detail oriented’) could make filling out the forms, with all their various formats, easier.
Here—fighting sheaves of paper, irritated authors and corrupted pdf files—that’s a reform I could get behind!
