With new disclosure rules from journals, universities, states and the feds, it should be easier to keep track of which doctors and researchers are heavily funded by the drug and device industry. But while there is more information, it can be hard to keep track of who is disclosing what to whom. When it comes to disclosure, is more becoming less?

Here’s one place to start from the Policy and Medicine blog:A chart of companies that disclose their educational grant payments for 2009 and 2010.

The Globe reports today on new Harvard rules on industry sponsorship of continuing medical education

Harvard Medical School will prohibit its 11,000 faculty from giving promotional talks for drug and medical device makers and accepting personal gifts, travel, or meals, under a new policy intended partly to guard against companies’ use of Harvard’s prestige to market their products.

The conflict-of-interest rules also place stricter limits on the income faculty can earn from companies for consulting, joining boards, and other work; require public reporting of payments of at least $5,000 on a medical school website; and promise more robust internal reporting and monitoring of these relationships.

Here’s Harvard’s own take on it

In reaching its decision, the Harvard COI committee noted “the complicated history of industry support for educational activities….Some companies have clearly used sponsorship of educational sessions inappropriately, namely, to attempt to increase market demand for company products and, at times, to promote uses beyond a product’s Food and Drug Administration indication.”

But failures of compliance shouldn’t “necessarily be interpreted to mean that all industry sponsorship of CME is biased and inappropriate. In fact, we have found little research or definitive data from the HMS, HSDM [School of Dental Medicine], or elsewhere proving one way or the other that industry-supported CME is generally more biased when required safeguards are imposed. Yet even the idea that some in industry may have advanced their marketing goals through the use of CME programs has tarnished academia’s trust in commercial support for CME.”

The new rules, which have been in the works for a while, come at a time when the state is considering backing off a new law that requires drug and devices makers to report payments to doctors for speaking, consulting and research.

At the same time, industry sponsors must now comply with the Physician Payment Sunshine Act.

As noted above, some drug makers — including Lilly and J&J — have already begun listing payments on their own web sites.

Click here for Lilly’s “Faculty Registry”

Last year, a new group called the Association of Clinical Researchers and Educators (ACRE) held its first meeting at Harvard. The group seeks “the advancement of patient care through productive collaboration with industry and its counterparts. ACRE seeks to define and promote balanced policies at academic medical centers and within government that will enhance rather than interfere with our highly valued collaboration.”

For more on the group’s opposition to disclosure laws, click here for a report on that meeting.

Thursday’s inaugural meeting of the Association of Clinical Researchers and Educators drew a full house to the Bornstein Amphitheater at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. Members of the group believe that disclosure rules and gift bans for doctors – like the one that just went into effect in Massachusetts – are too strict. The meeting program describes the issue this way:

“Under mounting pressure from interest groups, the media, and select government officials, academic medical centers have begun adopting restrictive conflict of interest policies that often sever productive relationships between industry and physicians involved in clinical research and educational outreach.”