What’s Missing in NIH COI Rules

The National Institutes of Health recently issued new rules for academic institutions to follow in “managing” faculty members who receive government grants yet maintain ties to private firms, especially drug and device companies. Eric Campbell of Harvard, the nation’s leading researcher on conflicts-of-interest in medicine, in this blog post up on the Health Affairs website notes the main flaw in the rules:

The National Institutes of Health recently issued new rules for academic institutions to follow in “managing” faculty members who receive government grants yet maintain ties to private firms, especially drug and device companies. Eric Campbell of Harvard, the nation’s leading researcher on conflicts-of-interest in medicine, in this blog post up on the Health Affairs website notes the main flaw in the rules:

As with all governmental regulations what is not included is often as important as what is included.  Most noticeably absent from the 2011 regulations is the requirement that all institutions must post FCOI information on the web.  This requirement was included in the initial draft of the 2011 regulations that were put out for public comment but was later abandoned for unknown reasons. Nor do the new regulations require institutions to make their management plans for FCOIs public.