May 2, 2008

1. AAMC Report Addresses Industry Funding of Medical Education

2. NIH Issues Notice Regarding Revised Public Access Policy

1. AAMC Report Addresses Industry Funding of Medical Education

The Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) Task Force on Industry Funding of Medical Education released its final report providing recommendations on the steps that should be taken to decrease conflicts of interest and ensure professional relationships between academic medical centers and various health industries. The report will undergo review by the AAMC Executive Council this June.

The report recommends banning drug and medical device companies from offering free food, gifts, and travel to physicians, faculty, and students at every medical school in the United States. It calls for academic medical centers to “adopt and implement policies that address specific interactions between academic medical personnel and industry…[and] reinforce institutional and individual efforts to promote a learning environment that supports professionalism and eliminates activities that undermine this objective.” The AAMC report recommends medical schools and teaching hospitals design curriculum standards and teaching materials to raise awareness among students, physicians-in-training, and faculty about “the processes and disciplines of drug discovery, development, clinical testing, safety, therapeutics, and regulation.”

The report also recommends that medical schools “strongly discourage participation by their faculty in industry-sponsored speakers’ bureaus.” If the academic medical centers decide to allow their faculty and staff to continue participating in industry-sponsored events, the academic medical center should develop standards that define appropriate and acceptable involvement.

A panel of institutional leaders, faculty, residents, students, ethicists, public representatives, and corporate executive officers from the pharmaceutical, biotechnology, and medical device industries spent two years creating the report in response to increased attention to the negative effects of the current model of academic-industry relationships, among both the academic medicine community and the general public.

An article in The New York Times provided a very positive review of the report with statements from the deans of Yale School of Medicine and Johns Hopkins School of Medicine indicating the report’s recommendations would influence how they shape conflict of interest policy. According to the article, the hope is that the example set by academic medical colleges will have a strong influence across medicine as a whole.

2. NIH Issues Notice Regarding Revised Public Access Policy

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) Office of Extramural Research released Monday, April 28, 2008, a reminder that compliance with the voluntary NIH Public Access Policy is now mandatory. The revised policy affects “all peer-reviewed articles that arise in whole or in part from direct costs funded by NIH or from NIH staff that are accepted for publication on or after April 7, 2008.”

The public access policy states: “The Director of the National Institutes of Health shall require that all investigators funded by the NIH submit or have submitted for them to the National Library of Medicine’s PubMed Central (PMC) an electronic version of their final, peer-reviewed manuscripts upon acceptance for publication, to be made publicly available no later than 12 months after the official date of publication, provided that the NIH shall implement the public access policy in a manner consistent with copyright law.”

Specific components of the public access policy require:

• Full compliance with all publishing or copyright agreements.
• Submission of all supplemental and graphic elements related to the final peer-reviewed article.
• Submission of the article to PMC.
• Inclusion of PMC or NIH manuscript submission reference number for all applications, proposals, and progress reports when citing related articles that emerge from NIH funded research, beginning May 25, 2008.

According to NIH, compliance with this policy is a statutory requirement. Failure to comply may result in one or more enforcement actions depending on the severity and duration of the infraction. For more information, please visit the NIH website.

The Alliance for Academic Internal Medicine—the nation’s largest academically focused specialty organization—consists of the Association of Professors of Medicine, the Association of Program Directors in Internal Medicine, the Association of Subspecialty Professors, the Clerkship Directors in Internal Medicine, and the Administrators of Internal Medicine.

Please contact AAIM Vice President for Policy Charles P. Clayton (cclayton@im.org), AAIM Policy Coordinator Nicole V. Baptista (nbaptista@im.org), or AAIM Policy Assistant Jessica L. O'Hara (johara@im.org) at (202) 861-9351 with questions or comments about this week’s Merlin.