Flickr, CarbonNYCIn a bid to increase transparency about researchers’ conflicts of interest, a group of biomedical institutions last week (November 28) proposed creating a central database to house all potential conflict data, and a harmonized system for disclosure. Outlined in a paper published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, the database would hold records about fees for services, intellectual property rights, industry grants, and ownership stakes, as well as payments for food, travel, and lodging.
“A coherent, uniform system will not only reduce the time spent by researchers on administrative tasks, but will very likely improve the accuracy and clarity of disclosure reporting,” Allen Lichter, lead author of the paper and CEO at the American Society of Clinical Oncology, said in a statement.
The proposal comes shortly before the “sunshine” provisions of the Affordable Care Act comes into effect next year—a law that requires drug manufacturers to publish on their company websites any payments to physicians and researchers of $10 or greater. The law would add another layer of disclosure requirements to an already confused and complicated process, said the authors. To reduce the administrative burden and increase accessibility to disclosure records, representatives of several institutes including the US Food ...
