January 4th, 2010
Braunwald Guides New Conflict-of-Interest Policy at Partners
Larry Husten, PHD
At the start of the year a far more stringent conflict-of-interest policy went into effect at Massachusetts General and Brigham and Women’s Hospital, according to a story in the New York Times. The new policy limits pay for top officials who serve as outside directors for companies and forbids any employee from accepting speaking fees from drug companies.
“We’re the first to go in this deep, and we’re still into it only up to our knees,” said Braunwald in the article. “In all fairness, what was O.K. three years ago is not O.K. now.”
2 Responses to “Braunwald Guides New Conflict-of-Interest Policy at Partners ”
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Have our morals changed in the past three years?
The oversight which is now being focused on ‘conflicts-of-interest’ within medicine is clearly something which has gained significant attention recently. However, I fail to see the how such conflicts which are not O.K. today, were O.K. three years ago. While there were not formal restrictions placed by university hospitals three years ago, this fact alone does not codone the actions of the past. If there is a true problem with the relationship between top university officials and private companies then this is not a new problem, but rather one which is just now being addressed.
If, on the other hand, these restrictions are being placed purely for appearance reasons then I guess one could argue that ‘what was O.K. three years ago is not O.K. now’.
There are academic leaders and others (pulled together recently in an organization called ACRE) that feel that the movement to manage conflicts of interest more aggressively in academic medicine is not necessary, that there is no evidence that such conflicts have any impact on the evidence (and that there is no evidence of such impact) and is in fact out of proportion to the problem and frankly offensive. Of course they cannot be more wrong. Braunwald’s statement — which could have been misquoted or quoted out of context — suggest a relativism and a “going with the times” approach, as if just the context had changed, not the correctness of the acts themselves. There is still, unfortunately, more work to be done in this journey towards recovering a professional authentic voice.