The new rules, to be announced today, are part of a growing trend among academic medical centers. Yale and the University of Pennsylvania, for example, have announced similar policies.
"We want to strengthen public confidence in assessing what happens in academic medicine," said in an interview with Dr. Philip A. Pizzo, dean of the Stanford School of Medicine. He said the new policy will mean millions of dollars a year for medical facilities in logistical support such as free meals that will be largely prohibited. "Many members of the faculty and departments have become completely dependent on pharmaceutical companies to organize seminars," he says.
The new rules, effective October 1, would also prohibit doctors from accepting free drug samples and publishing articles in magazines when you suspect they are written by the finance company. The policy also applies to sales representatives and other medical device companies, not just pharmaceuticals. Representatives of the company shall be removed from areas where treatment is administered and educate doctors, with some exceptions. Doctors who buy medical equipment will have to disclose any financial relationship with suppliers of equipment and could be excluded from decision-making, the university said.
The change is part of a reaction against corporate influence on medicine along with growing concerns about security and the price of drugs and medical devices. About 90 percent of marketing budget (21 billion dollars) of the pharmaceutical industry is directed at physicians, according to an article by an influential group of doctors, scientists and lawyers in the Journal of the American Medical Association in January . The article called on academic medical centers to adopt policies like Stanford, since the existing guidelines (ban on expensive gifts), were not sufficient. Some studies have shown that even small gifts create a sense of obligation, while free drug samples are "a powerful incentive for physicians and patients rely on medications that are expensive but not more effective."
One of the authors of the article, Dr. David Blumenthal, a professor at Harvard and Director of the Institute for Health Policy at Massachusetts General Hospital, said yesterday, "I am pleasantly surprised at the impact it has had the article."
Scott Lassman, Director General of the Group of Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, said the new policies were a "step backward for patients and physicians" because they prevent doctors interact with sales representatives. "Sales representatives of the company, from our point of view, have much useful information about medications, how to use them, and how not to use them."
David Magnus, director of the Center for Biomedical Ethics at Stanford, said the new policy has "almost everything I wanted" and predicted it would lead to "a substantial change in our culture." Dr. Magnus was on the committee that developed the new policy over a year.
The new policy does not cover consulting agreements between faculty members and companies aimed at developing drugs and medical devices. These agreements are subject to the existing rules of conflict of interest. Such interactions are especially important at Stanford, where many teachers have been involved in founding and consulting companies in Silicon Valley.
More than 700 members of the medical school last year disclosed 299 potential conflicts of interest related to their research, according to a July article in The San Jose Mercury News. More than a third of university administrators, department heads and other charges had financial interests related to their research.
A Stanford spokeswoman said having financial interests is not necessarily a conflict if the faculty member is not providing medical care.
