Physician Payment Sunshine – University of Miami Reports Confluence of Interests

The Miami Herald reported that the University of Miami medical school has become one of the first in the country to offer an online, searchable database explaining its physicians’ relationships with outside businesses.

The payment data, is searchable by name of faculty member or by name of company. It will be updated at least annually and now includes data for fiscal 2009 — which ended May 31, 2009. It lists doctors’ relationship with outside companies — but not the dollar amounts of the deals, which will start to be added later this year.

Other schools including, Duke, Cleveland Clinic, Stanford, the University of Washington, Northwestern and University of Minnesota have adopted similar websites.  

This kind of reporting and transparency is also similar to that of companies such as Eli Lilly, Merck, GlaxoSmithKline and more recently Pfizer, who have started websites listing payments to physicians.

Richard Bookman, UM’s executive dean for research and training, asserted that the medical school was “taking a strong stand in favor of transparency,” and the website even includes payments made to the executive dean himself. The article also noted that Pascal Goldschmidt, dean of the medical school, is shown to receive money from three companies where he serves on the board of directors: Mednax, OPKO Health and Synecor. Also, a search for GlaxoSmithKline shows that 12 UM doctors receive money for lectures or consulting.

Adding UM to the list of medical schools who disclose payments from industry made to those in academia is a step in the right direction. It will reveal to critics that despite the potential for conflict, these financial relationships establish and build new ways for industry and academia to collaborate and create new treatments and ways to help patients. The more these payments are revealed, the more the public will realize that such partnerships are commonplace, acceptable, and critical for the ongoing education and training of physicians to help keep up with the fast paced field of medicine.