NIH to Drop Requirement for Websites Disclosing Researchers’ Ties to Industry
Today’s word comes from Nature News that the NIH is dropping a proposed requirement for universities to disclose researchers’ financial ties to industry on websites. This is a loss for patients, who may not be aware of their doctors’ relationships with pharmaceutical companies and others who fund clinical trials, fellowships, conference junkets and other perks for physicians.
In 2010, NIH Director Francis Collins wrote: “As the nation’s biomedical research agency, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) must ensure that the research it funds on the behalf of US taxpayers is scientifically rigorous and free of bias.”
This sounds right to me, as it did to the folks at the health and safety arm of Public Citizen, according to the Nature report:
…a cornerstone of that transparency drive — a series of publicly accessible websites detailing such financial conflicts — has now been dropped. “They have pulled the rug out from under this,” says Sidney Wolfe, director of the Health Research Group at Public Citizen, a consumer-protection organization based in Washington DC. “It greatly diminishes the amount of vigilance that the public can exercise over financially conflicted research being funded by the NIH.”
As explained in the article, the proposal came about after evidence came to light that prominent NIH grant recipients had failed to inform their employers (universities and medical schools) about lucrative payments from companies that may have influenced their research. The problem now comes, in part, from lack of funding: the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) has no way to enforce the requirement.
That’s no surprise. But it turns out that academic groups lobbied against the requirement. According to the Nature News piece, the Association of American Universities and the Association of American Medical Colleges submitted a joint statement objecting that a website detailing physicians’ potential conflicts of interest (COI) would be onerous:
“There are serious and reasonable concerns among our members that the Web posting will be of little practical value to the public and, without context for the information, could lead to confusion rather than clarity regarding financial conflicts of interest and how they are managed.”
As a patient and as a physician who’s cared for patients in clinical trials and served on an institutional review board (IRB), I can’t be more clear in my thinking that the public should know about academic (and all) physicians’ ties with industry. Every institution with NIH funding should make this kind of information readily available and clear to patients. Otherwise, the faculty don’t deserve the NIH support they’re receiving for the research, nor do they deserve the public’s trust in their work.
Patients should be able to find this kind of information readily, before they enroll in clinical trials or decide to undergo any elective procedures, and even before they choose the physician who would guide them in health care decisions.
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Couldn’t agree more with you, Elaine, that institutions should make such disclosures of ties more readily available, NIH or not.
I’m always shocked though, at the contempt some researchers have for disclosures at meetings and curtly announce “my disclosures” and the whizz onto the next slide before you have a chance to read them. Others only provide disclosure relevant to the companies they are mentioning in their talk, which gives a very limited view of their activities.