Our financial transparency system for drug and device maker payments to medical consultants isn’t working, and universities are all but incapable of policing their faculty’s conflicts of interests.
A New York Times article reports this week that the ongoing Congressional inquiry into financial conflict-of-interest disclosures has revealed another influential psychiatrist violated federal research rules by failing to report income from Big Pharma.
Dr. Charles B. Nemeroff of Emory University, the Times reports, is “the most prominent example to date in a series of disclosures that is shaking the world of academic medicine and seems likely to force broad changes in the relationships between doctors and drug makers.”
Dr. Nemeroff earned more than $2.8 million in consulting arrangements with drug makers between 2000 and 2007, and violated federal research rules by not reporting at least $1.2 million of it to his university, according to documents provided to the Congressional investigation being spearheaded by Sen. Charles R. Grassley, Republican of Iowa.
“After questioning about 20 doctors and research institutions, it looks like problems with transparency are everywhere,” Sen. Grassley said. “The current system for tracking financial relationships isn’t working.”
In one “telling example”, the Times reports, Dr. Nemeroff signed a letter dated July 15, 2004, promising Emory administrators that he would earn less than the federal legal limit of $10,000 a year from GlaxoSmithKline. “But on that day, he was at the Four Seasons Resort in Jackson Hole, Wyo., earning $3,000 of what would become $170,000 in income that year from the British drug giant — 17 times the figure he had agreed on,” says the Times.
The findings, says the Times, suggest that universities are all but incapable of policing their faculty’s conflicts of interests. Almost every major medical school and medical society is now reassessing its relationships with drug and device makers.
Not An Isolated Problem
Dr. Nemeroff isn’t the first psychiatrist the inquiry has found coming up short on financial conflict-of-interest disclosures to their institutions.
Last spring, Sen. Grassley began his investigation by questioning Dr. Melissa P. DelBello of the University of Cincinnati after the Times questioned her connections to drug makers. Although Dr. DelBello reported that she earned about $100,000 from 2005 to 2007 from eight drug makers, Sen. Grassley discovered that AstraZeneca alone paid her $238,000 during the period.
In earlier blogs, we reported on several prominent Harvard psychs, and Sen. Grassley’s growing interest in how much money from Big Pharma is flowing into the American Psychiatric Association itself. The senator also looked closely at Dr. Alan F. Schatzberg of Stanford, the APA’s president-elect, because of his $4.8 million in stock holdings in a drug development company.
Sen. Grassley is pushing the “Physician Payment Sunshine Act” that would require drug and device companies to publicly list payments made to doctors that exceed $500. Several states have already legislated similar requirements, and revelations from the Congressional investigation appear to be motivating some motion in the industry itself. Big Pharma’s trade organizations and some medical colleges say they support the Sunshine bill, and Eli Lilly and Merck announced they will publicly list doctor payments next year even without the legislation.