Healthy Skepticism Library item: 15386

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Publication type: news

Rockoff JD.
Stanford Medical School to Disclose More About Industry Comp
The Wall Street Journal Blog 2009 Apr 1
http://blogs.wsj.com/health/2009/04/01/stanford-medical-school-to-disclose-more-about-industry-comp/

Full text:

Stanford University’s medical school will begin to publicly identify doctors and other faculty members who receive more than $5,000 annually from drug and medical-device companies – but it won’t put an exact figure on how much they were paid.

The medical school said today it expects to post an online list by the end of the summer showing its staff members who received payments, royalties, stock grants and other compensation topping $5,000 in 2008. Companies providing the compensation to each staff member on the list will be identified but the dollar amounts staffers received above $5,000 won’t be included.

Another academic medical center, the Cleveland Clinic, began publicly reporting similar information about its doctors late last year. Several companies have said they’ll also disclose, including heavyweights like Pfizer, Merck, GlaxoSmithKline and Eli Lilly.

Drug makers and medical schools are under pressure to disclose their connections. Sen. Charles Grassley, a Republican from Iowa, has been investigating conflicts of interest in the industry and has proposed legislation requiring drug and device makers to regularly report their payments to doctors.

Allan Coukell, director of the Pew Prescription Project, a group that is pushing to eliminate physician conflicts of interest, told the Health Blog that Stanford’s threshold for reporting industry comp isn’t as low as called for in the proposed legislation. But he added that “Stanford’s move toward more transparency around physician-industry relationships is a welcome step forward.”

Among the targets of the Grassley’s investigations was Alan Schatzberg, who chairs Stanford’s psychiatry department. A Stanford spokesman said that Schatzberg had always disclosed his industry ties to the university, but under the policy, those ties will be disclosed publicly.