Conflict of interest (COI) reporting has moved center stage again in recent months, with some medical journals, professional societies, cancer centers, and academic medical institutions reviewing policies and practices in the wake of a highly publicized disclosure failure last fall at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSK).
Neil Osterweil/ MDedge News
Dr. José Baselga
And in some settings, oncologists and other physician researchers are being encouraged to check what the federal Open Payments database says about their payments from industry.
The spotlight is on the field of cancer research and treatment, where MSK’s chief medical officer, José Baselga, MD, PhD, resigned in September 2018 after the New York Times and ProPublica reported that he’d failed to disclose millions of dollars of industry payments and ownership interests in the majority of journal articles he wrote or cowrote over a 4-year period.
COI disclosure issues have a broad reach, however, and the policy reviews, debates, and hashing out of responsibilities that are now taking place likely will have implications for all of medicine.
Among the questions: Who enforces disclosure rules and how should cases of incomplete or inconsistent disclosure be handled? How can COI declarations be made easier for researchers? Should disclosure be based on self-reported relevancy, or more comprehensive in nature?
Such questions are being debated nationally. On Feb. 12, 2019, leaders from academia, journals, and medical societies came together in Washington, D.C., at the offices of the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) for a closed-door meeting focused on COI disclosures. MSK, the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO), and the Council of Medical Specialty Societies led the charge as cosponsors of the meeting.
“We’ve been dealing with disclosure issues in a siloed way in exchanges [between journal editors and authors, for instance, or between speakers and CME providers]. And academic institutions have their own robust disclosure mechanisms that they use internally,” said Heather Pierce, JD, MPH, senior director of science policy and regulatory counsel for the AAMC. “There’s a growing understanding that these conversations need to be happening across these different sectors.”
