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Showing posts with label Medical Device Company. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Medical Device Company. Show all posts

Friday, May 24, 2013

Doctors’ Lucrative Industry Ties

By Roni Caryn Rabin
The New York Times - The Consumer Blog
Originally published May 13, 2013

Dr. Alfred J. Tria is the chief of orthopedic surgery at St. Peter’s University Hospital, a 478-bed facility in New Brunswick, N.J., and to the medical technology company Smith & Nephew, his good word is worth a million bucks. Well, $940,857, to be precise.

That’s how much the company paid Dr. Tria in fees for promoting its products and training doctors in Asia to use them from 2009 to 2011, according to disclosures required by the state of Massachusetts, where Dr. Tria is licensed. In 2010, Dr. Tria earned $421,905 from private industry — more than any other Massachusetts-licensed physician that year.

Dr. Tria may be an outlier, but gifts and payments to physicians from drug and medical device companies have been rampant in medicine for decades. Over a two-and-a-half-year period, device and drug companies shelled out over $76 million just to physicians licensed in Massachusetts, according to a study published online this month in The New England Journal of Medicine. That amount does not include outlays of less than $50, which are exempt from disclosure.

The entire story is here.

Sunday, September 11, 2011

NIH Finalizes Financial Conflict of Interest Rules

The Washington Post
Published: August 23

The National Institutes of Health has finalized rules to reduce financial conflicts of interests among federally funded researchers who also receive payments or stock from drug and medical device companies.

The rules, which will affect more than 40,000 researchers, come after a string of high profile cases in which federally funded researchers failed to disclose millions of dollars from companies with a financial interest in the outcome of their work.

Researchers who receive more than $5,000 in income from drug or device companies must disclose the payments. Universities or other institutions employing the researchers must collect the data and provide for public access to it.

But in an about-face from proposed rules announced last year, institutions will not be forced to disclose conflict-of-interest information online. (See our prior blog post).  Instead, they may maintain the data offline and provide it only when requested.

This change reduces the administrative burden of the proposed public disclosure rule for institutions employing federally funded researchers, said Sally Rockey, the NIH’s deputy director for extramural research.

Universities also will be required to develop plans to manage the financial conflicts of individual researchers, but the plans do not have to be made public.

Praising the “vast majority of researchers” as ethical and sensitive to conflicts of interest, NIH Director Francis S. Collins called the new rules “an insurance plan against potential trouble downstream.”

Collins added that the rules will ensure that government-funded researchers can continue working with private companies.

The rest of the story can be read here.