Healthy Skepticism Library item: 15142

Warning: This library includes all items relevant to health product marketing that we are aware of regardless of quality. Often we do not agree with all or part of the contents.

Publication type: report

Industry Funding of Medical Education: Report of an AAMC Task Force
Washington: Association of American Medical Colleges 2008 Jun
https://services.aamc.org/Publications/showfile.cfm?file=version114.pdf&prd_id=232&prv_id=281&pdf_id=114

Abstract:

An effective and principled partnership between academic medical centers and
various health industries is critical in order to realize fully the benefits of
biomedical research and ensure continued advances in the prevention, diagnosis,
and treatment of disease. Appropriate management of this partnership by both
academic medical centers and industry is crucial to ensure that it remains
principled, thereby sustaining public trust in the proposition that both partners
are fundamentally dedicated to the welfare of patients and the improvement of
public health.
Over recent decades, medical schools and teaching hospitals have become
increasingly dependent on industry support of their core educational missions.
This reliance raises concerns because such support, including gifts, can influence
the objectivity and integrity of academic teaching, learning, and practice, thereby
calling into question the commitment of academia and industry together to
promote the public’s interest by fostering the most cost-effective, evidence-based
medical care possible.
The Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) embraces the obligation
of the profession to manage, through effective self-regulation, all real or perceived
conflicts of interest. Accordingly, in 2006 AAMC charged a special Task Force on
Industry Funding of Medical Education (hereafter referred to as Task Force) with
forging consensus principles to guide the AAMC and the leaders of medical
schools and teaching hospitals in developing policies and procedures to manage
industry gifting practices and financial support of their programs of medical
education for students, trainees, faculty, and community physicians. This report
is the product of the Task Force’s efforts.
The Report acknowledges the new policy directions being implemented in many
medical schools and teaching hospitals to address industry support of medical
education, and it urges all academic medical centers to accelerate their adoption
of policies that better manage, and when necessary, prohibit, academic-industry
interactions that can inherently create conflicts of interest and undermine standards
of professionalism. Although the charge to the Task Force was focused on funding
from the pharmaceutical and device industries, institutional policies on conflicts
of interest should be comprehensive and encompass providers of equipment and
services as well. Concomitantly, industry should voluntarily discontinue those
practices that compromise professionalism as well as public trust.

1 The Task Force report and recommendations have been approved unconditionally by all Task Force members, with the exception of Jeffrey B. Kindler (Pfizer), Kevin Sharer (Amgen), and Sidney Taurel (Lilly). Mr. Sharer supports the “explicit recommendations” of the Task Force, but “is not in a position to endorse the text” of the report.Mr. Sharer further states that “It is understandable that industry and academe will not agree completely on the final wording of any report given our differing roles in health care.” Mr. Kindler and Mr. Taurel support all but one of the Task Force recommendations, noting that “We do so without endorsing all of the supporting arguments used in the body of the report.” The recommendation of concern, in Chapter 2 under the heading of “Industry-Sponsored Programs,” actively discourages academic physicians from participating in industry-sponsored, FDA-regulated speaker programs. Mr. Kindler and Mr. Taurel further state that “We believe the reasoning for many of the recommendations is directionally correct, but more often than not the potential issues addressed reflect perceptions rather than proven consequences.” The full statements from these Task Force members are presented in Appendix B.