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Friday, May 19, 2017

Conflict of Interest: Why Does It Matter?

Harvey V. Fineberg
JAMA. 2017;317(17):1717-1718.

Preservation of trust is the essential purpose of policies about conflict of interest. Physicians have many important roles including caring for individual patients, protecting the public’s health, engaging in research, reporting scientific and clinical discoveries, crafting professional guidelines, and advising policy makers and regulatory bodies. Success in all these functions depends on others—laypersons, professional peers, and policy leaders—believing and acting on the word of physicians. Therefore, the confidence of others in physician judgment is of paramount importance. When trust in physician judgment is impaired, the role of physicians is diminished.

Physicians should make informed, disinterested judgments. To be disinterested means being free of personal advantage. The type of advantage that is typically of concern in most situations involving physicians is financial. When referring to conflict of interest, the term generally means a financial interest that relates to the issue at hand. More specifically, a conflict of interest can be discerned by using a reasonable person standard; ie, a conflict of interest exists when a reasonable person would interpret the financial circumstances pertaining to a situation as potentially sufficient to influence the judgment of the physician in question.

The article is here.