Cleveland Clinic journal of medicine
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The Association of American Medical Colleges has issued three major reports to help academic medical centers manage financial conflicts of interest in clinical research. One report addresses individual conflicts, another addresses institutional conflicts, and the third is a survey-based assessment of institutions performance to date in conflict-of-interest management. While implementation of policies to manage individual conflicts has been significant and widespread, the extent to which institutional conflicts are being managed is unclear. Developing effective and accepted policies to manage potential conflicts involving the funding of education remains a major challenge.
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Development of medical devices requires interaction between physicians and industry that is considerably more intimate than that in pharmaceutical development. Progress in procedure-based medicine would be stalled if this collaboration were eliminated. ⋯ AdvaMed, a trade association for the medical device industry, has developed a code of ethics to manage many of these conflicts and to guide its members' interactions with health care professionals. This article reviews the rationale for the AdvaMed code and provides a brief in terms of c overview of the code itself.onflict-of-interest cons iderations, the world of medical devices is significantly dif-
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Recently updated ethics rules for employees of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) aim to prevent inappropriate influences on research decisions while preserving employees' professional and scientific interactions. Specific provisions require NIH employees to report their financial holdings in "substantially affected organizations" and require senior employees to divest all holdings greater than $15,000 in any single such organization. ⋯ Public-private partnerships have become more important to NIH efforts to advance biomedical research in light of flat NIH budgets in recent years. Such partnerships open the door, however, to financial conflicts that must be prevented or managed in order to maintain scientific integrity and public trust.