Conflict of interest and medical schools
US medical schools are scored on how they deal with the drug industry
- By: Sally Carter
In December last year the American Medical Students Association (AMSA) released their 2010 PharmFree scorecard, which gives a national overview of how US medical schools deal with the drug industry, and an analysis of the policies at each school.
The AMSA findings included:
AMSA worked with the Pew Prescription Project—an initiative to promote reforms in the approval, manufacture, and marketing of prescription drugs and initiatives to encourage evidence based prescribing—to develop the scorecard. The first version of the scorecard was released in 2007, and, as Tim Anderson, director at the AMSA, says: “Initially . . . the scorecard found that many schools did not have comprehensive, or even adequate, conflict of interest policies in place. Since then we have observed a strong trend in the number of schools with updated policies, which have almost all been more comprehensive . . . Additionally we’ve seen a large rise in the number