Over the past few months, a variety of academic medical schools and institutions have begun to create and ‘strengthen’ ethics policies, (this is code for restricting just about everything with industry).
Recently, Emory University School of Medicine joined this group by announcing the establishment of a “toughened ethics policy to better govern faculty and students in their financial dealings with outside industry.”
The case of Emory however should not come as a surprise since last year the university became the focus of an ethics investigation by Congress and the National Institutes of Health.
As a result, the NIH froze funds for a $9.3 million project. At the center of the Congressional investigation was Dr. Charles Nemeroff, the former chairman of Emory’s psychiatric and behavioral sciences department and an international expert on depression.
According to the Atlanta Journal Constitution, the investigators discovered that Dr. Nemeroff had received $2.8 million in consulting fees from companies whose drugs he was evaluating and he failed to report a third of that amount to the university. Since the investigation, Dr. Nemeroff has left the department chairmanship but remains a professor at Emory.
When the investigation began last year, Charles Nemeroff professor stated that, “to the best of his knowledge, he followed the appropriate university regulations concerning financial disclosures.” Consequently, the school of medicine’s new ethics policy states that:
– Faculty, staff, students and trainees are prohibited from receiving any compensation, gifts or travel expenses from industry for speaking at industry promotional events. This is regardless of whether the speaker retains the money or gives away the funds to charity), whether they creates their own or use company slides. They do allow for non-ACCME accredited events but those must be approved in advance.
– Faculty, staff, students and trainees are prohibited from accepting gifts from industry regardless of the amount. Industry gifts to the School of Medicine must be received through the School of Medicine Development Office.
– Samples will be controlled and dispensed by a central office.
– Industry representatives will have access to Emory buildings and personnel only by faculty invitation for necessary interactions. Sales and marketing representatives will be restricted from educational and training events and from patient areas.
– Faculty will disclose any financial relationships with industry in all formal lectures, and students and trainees may not be assigned to projects that are related to a faculty adviser’s conflict of interests.
– CME current rules will remain the same.
Accordingly, the Medical school is now looking for a new psychiatry department head, and the $9.3 million project has resumed, without any involvement from Dr. Nemeeroff.
Ultimately, while the final results from the investigation have not been made fully public, this specific incident highlights the need for doctors to properly disclose their relationships with industry.
While the majority of physicians and doctors in academic medicine follow disclosure policies almost religiously, there can sometimes be confusion among the chaotic daily lives of these professionals.
However, we should be reminded that one case of conflict does not mean that all academic medical schools should ban industry, but that they should be working more closely with doctors to make sure they understand disclosure policies adequately.
The rules adopted by Emory serves as one more example of just how “worried” universities are that they may lose their government grants. As more and more Universities become dependent on government funded research, they will be throwing over the ship many of their best and brightest researchers and eventually universities will only conduct state run clinical trials, in the end the creation of newer therapies will greatly diminish and we will all suffer.
Atlanta Journal Constitution: Emory Medical School Tightens Ethics
Emory University: Conflict of Interest Policy