IMAP-Prescription Project: Report on Conflict of Interest in Medical Societies

Prescription Project who’s stated goal is Ensuring that industry-physician relationships are free of conflicts of interest …(kicking industry out of medicine), has hired The Institute of Medicine as a Profession to write a report on Conflict of Interest Policies in Medical Societies is expected to be released in Early 2009.

According to both parties the Report will be very similar to the AAMC report on conflict of interest in medical education released earlier this summer but without any of the constraints that the AAMC report had by including university leadership and industry.

 Rather than engaging the associations, the staff at IMAP has selected to cherry pick “friends” who are former and current association leaders and officers to write the report. 

The report will be closer to the Macy Report in that it will come from a single perspective and the participants will have their names and affiliations listed at the end as authors to give the impression of society endorsement without having to go though the trouble of getting the actual buy in of the medical societies and their leadership.   

The report will be released with much fan-fair, including articles in major papers who will write this up as a seminal event.

The report will outline the current “problem”: industry cooperates with associations on sponsorships of exhibits at annual meetings, grants to support CME, support of data registries, and other activities and then direct associations to loose all these ties with industry in the interest of “professionalism” and include an outline on how to implement the proposed policy with no realistic plan to replace the lost income to the societies.

Though I think that these types of efforts are useful in helping to define potential problems and proposed policies and procedures, they fail to get the input of all parties effected by their proposed policies, and are usually from a single perspective, leaving them suspect of exclusion.

To understand just how effective the Prescription Project and IMAP are and how they work hand in hand I encourage you to read the recently published JAMA article by David Rothman, MD the Director of IMAP: New Developments in Managing Physician-Industry Relationships in JAMA