Harvard Medical School will prohibit its 11,000 faculty from giving promotional talks for drug and medical device makers and accepting personal gifts, travel, or meals, under a new policy intended partly to guard against companies' use of Harvard's prestige to market their products.
The conflict-of-interest rules also place stricter limits on the income faculty can earn from companies for consulting, joining boards, and other work; require public reporting of payments of at least $5,000 on a medical school website; and promise more robust internal reporting and monitoring of these relationships.
Harvard, which provides continuing medical education for tens of thousands of doctors worldwide, also will erect a more solid firewall between itself and health care companies during these courses. The greatest impact will be on Pri-Med, an annual conference for primary care doctors at a Boston convention center, which features Harvard-taught courses. Pharmaceutical companies pay for separate breakfast, lunch, and dinner lectures by non-Harvard specialists and even market products in restrooms. The industry program will be moved to a more separate location, and marketing signs will no longer be allowed in bathrooms.
The new rules, which will be phased in after Jan. 1, are designed to keep doctors from becoming — or being perceived as — marketing agents for industry, said Dr. Robert Mayer, cochairman of the committee that wrote the new policy. "We're anxious to be viewed publicly as doing what's in the best interest of our patients,'' he said. The school wants to "ensure credibility even more than we do today.''
The group attempted to strike a careful balance, said Mayer and Dr. Jeffrey Flier, the medical school dean, reducing problematic conflicts while protecting collaboration between faculty and companies on research, because these relationships lead to important and life-saving treatments. Faculty still will be allowed to conduct industry-funded research and work as paid members of company scientific advisory boards.
