Conflict of Interest and Medical Innovation Ensuring Integrity While Facilitating Innovation in Medical Research: Workshop Summary (2014) / Chapter Skim
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4 Public Perceptions of Conflict of Interest
4 Public Perceptions of Conflict of Interest
Pages 31-38
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From page 31... ...
• Freely available databases will provide necessary transparency about financial relationships, but it is important that the context of those relationships and their value is also conveyed in order to avoid negative presumptions that might be made about col laborations. • Communicating to patients the nature of the relationships and the benefits of those relationships is just as important as sharing information about the risks of physician–industry collaborations.
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From page 32... ...
A better understanding is needed of what type of information is of interest to the public and which elements members of the public need to know about in order to obtain a better understanding about why collaborations are desirable. COMMUNICATING CONFLICT OF INTEREST Often when members of the public learn about collaborations between a physician and a health care company, they infer that the relationship has negative consequences.
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From page 33... ...
In 2010 the Healthcare Leadership Council created the National Dialogue for Healthcare Innovation as a forum for diverse voices to address issues of conflict of interest and progress in health care, Grealy said. The initiative was designed to bring industry, health care providers, academics, government officials, and patients to the same table to share their views and to work on how to continue to innovate while earning the trust of the public.
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From page 34... ...
For the past several years these are the questions that Charles Ornstein, a senior reporter for ProPublica, and his colleagues have examined. In 2010, ProPublica, an independent nonprofit news organization, launched a project called Dollars for Docs, which compiles publicly available data from pharmaceutical companies about their payments to health professionals into a single easy-to-search freely available database.
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From page 35... ...
But, he added, "a lot of doctors receive the bulk of their money for giving paid promotional talks on behalf of companies." For example, one physician was recently the first to exceed $1 million in speaking and consulting fees over the past 4 years, even though not all of the companies in the database have disclosed for that entire period and not all companies are in the database. The website provides lists of the notable drugs made by each company as well as links to an NIH website providing impartial information about those drugs.
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From page 36... ...
That's what we've chosen to focus on -- the areas where there is less uniformity of perspective." While the work of ProPublica is important, there is concern that the presentation of the conflict of interest data may diminish the significance of the role of these collaborations for supporting research, said Paul Billings, chief medical officer at Life Technologies. For example, the stories about individual physicians who had received large compensations for their presentations did not contain much detail about why they earned their money, and "they have a right to [their]
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From page 37... ...
Because non-physicians will be increasingly prescribing medications as health care reform proceeds, such non-physicians will need to be included in any effort to monitor conflicts of interest, a workshop participant observed. One project at ProPublica that is doing just that collects data about prescriptions that health providers across the country have written in the Medicare Part D program.
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From page 38... ...
Meaningful information needs to be collected in a useful and efficient way, Grealy said. Many companies supported the Physician Payments Sunshine Act because different states were passing their own disclosure legislation with different rules, whereas the Physician Payments Sunshine Act will impose a nationwide standard, Ornstein said.
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