Conflict of Interest / External Databases, in the news again!

Last week's New York Times article about Research Conflicts of Interest within the University community included a link to the US Department of Health and Human Services Office of Inspector General (OIG) audit report. The audit report identifies that financial conflicts, including equity ownership in companies in which researchers' financial interests could significantly affect the grant research. Simply stated, the doctor who reports that compound XYZ could be a breakthrough drug for treatment of disease, may profit significantly from their own research. And that personal gain may not be known to their University, the general public, or the National Institute of Health (NIH) who is often the sponsor of that research.

Though grantee institutions often require researchers to disclose conflicts of interest in research publications, the same institutions rarely reduce or eliminate the financial conflicts. Ninety percent of grantee institutions rely solely on researcher discretion to determine which interests are required to be reported. Because equity interests (i.e. stock ownership) is rarely required to be reported, the specific financial interests of NIH-funded researchers are often unknown.

The OIG audit report recommends that National Institute of Health request grantee institutions to provide detailes to NIH regarding the nature of ALL reported financial conflicts of interest, and how the conflicts are managed, reduced, or eliminated. This change, if implemented, would be a major step-up in Oversight on how the University Research community is monitored.

Stay tuned - the compliance and record keeping impact of such changes could be quite widespread. Fortunately for some universities who have implemented Continuous Controls Monitoring (CCM-T) solutions that compare data from internal to external databases, these changes may be easier to implement. For more information, see: www.VisualRiskIQ.com/HigherEd

For related posts, see: October 2009 and July 2009 blog entries.