The Case of the Vanishing Graduate Medical Education Funds

While primary care falters in the US, those who teach it seem to feel increasingly poverty stricken.  Now it appears that one reason for this is an amazing example of multiple failures of transparency and accountability.  Let me work through it, begging your pardon for a little bit of "inside baseball," medical education style.  The results suggest how we desperately need some medical disciples of Sherlock Holmes.

Background

My personal experience and increasing data suggests that most medical school faculty believe that their teaching is not valued by their institutions because teaching brings in no external funds.  In 2004, Dr Catherine DeAngelis, then the editor of JAMA, wrote "few medical schools provide adequate, if any, reimbursement for teaching time."(1)  (See this 2005 post.)   This seems absurd on its face, since what are medical schools for if it is not to provide teaching. 

However, there is evidence of this mission-hostile behavior.  In 2007, we quoted from a revealing interview with Dr Lee Goldman, Executive Vice President for Health and Biomedical Sciences at Columbia University,(2) who stated that "taxpayers," faculty who "generate more [money] than they cost," are valued most, and implied that faculty who focus on teaching are regarded as "welfare recipients," who bring in less external funding, and are valued least.  In 2010, we noted the results of a large-scale survey presented by Dr Linda Pololi in which 51% of faculty felt that the administration only valued them for the money that they brought in, and half felt that their institutions did not value teaching.(3)

Yet while faculty seem to believe that educational institutions receive little if any money to pay for teaching, it is not clear why the believe something so counter intuitive, and it is less clear what money actually goes to pay for medical education.

US Government Funding for Graduate Medical Education

However, several recent publications affirm that actually a lot of money goes towards one important form of medical education, yet the specifics of the money flows are shrouded in secrecy.  In the May, 2012, SGIM Forum, Dr Mark Liebow and colleagues summarized some of what is known about federal support of graduate medical education, that is, education of interns, residents, and other house officers.(4)  There are two streams of money that flow from Medicare to US hospitals:

Direct GME (DGME) payments help hospitals pay the salaries of residents, teaching faculty, and support staff. DGME is the product of three numbers: a per resident amount that varies by hospital, adjusted annually for inflation; the number of residents in the hospital (capped for each hospital at 1997 levels); and the fraction of discharges from the hospital that are Medicare beneficiaries. The Indirect Medical Education (IME) payment is a percentage amount added on to each DRG payment. The percentage is calculated via a complex formula (the only US statute containing an exponent!), where the key factor is the ratio of interns/residents to beds (IRB ratio).

These two streams are of considerable size:

Of the $9.2 billion Medicare paid for GME in 2010, $3 billion was for DGME and $6.2 billion for IME. The money is paid to hospitals sponsoring training programs rather than to the training programs or other hospitals where training occurs. While about 1,100 hospitals receive GME payments, 66% goes to the 200 hospitals that have the largest numbers of residents.

So, the 200 largest hospitals get about $2 billion in direct GME money (and presumably about another $4 billion in indirect money). This averages then to about $10 million DGME and $20 million indirect GME per hospital.

Thus, teaching, at least the teaching of interns, residents, and other house-staff does pay, and much more than trivial amounts. (Note that these amounts are not for teaching of medical students, which ought to be supported by other funding streams.)

Why then do faculty think that teaching does not bring in any money?

The GME Money Vanishes

An article by Dr Saima I Chaudhry and colleagues in the American Journal of Medicine begins to explain, although the explanations are found between the lines.(5)

First of all, while the graduate medical education money is paid by the government to the hospitals, the government does not publish what it pays to individual hospitals:

It has been previously reported that the amount of GME funding individual hospitals receive is not publicly reported by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services,....

The government also does not hold the hospitals accountable for how they spend this money, nor for the quantity or quality of education they supply in exchange for it.

Remarkably, Chaudhry et al imply that that the people who run graduate medical education teaching programs also may not know how much money their hospitals receive from the government to fund their programs. The introduction to their article noted:

It is unclear how much program directors know about the amount and flow of DME funds to their programs. Program directors' beliefs about the transparency of funding to their programs, or their desire to influence how funds are distributed to them, also are unknown.

The article reported on a survey of internal medicine residency program directors which asked about "their knowledge of D[G]ME funding for their programs, the transparency with which funds are distributed to them, and their desire to influence this disbursement." The researchers sent surveys to 372 member programs, representing 97.1% of all US internal medicine residencies. They got 268 responses, a 72.0% response rate.

The main results were that only 159/268 (59.3%) of program directors had tried to find out how much DGME money their programs received, and of those, only 84 (52.8% of those enquiring, but only 31.3% of all respondents) actually knew how much money their programs got.

Of the 92 program directors who did not even try to discover how much money their programs received, approximately 21% said that "no one would tell me," 21% said that the "information would be inaccurate," 14% said they "don't know who to ask," and 2% were "afraid to ask."

Summary

US medical school faculty, especially those in primary care, increasingly feel pressured to perform activities that they perceive brings in money from external sources. They tend to believe that their own teaching somehow does not bring in any money, and that their careers will fail if they do not put more emphasis on other activities that the institution views as more profitable.

However, literally billions of US government dollars go to support the education of house staff, including the salaries of faculty who teach interns and residents, who probably are the majority of physician faculty. Faculty probably do not know this, because the government does not publish the amounts given to individual hospitals, nor demand of the hospitals any accountability for how they spend the money they receive.

Presumably, the top executives of each hospital know how much money the government gives them. Nonetheless, the majority of physician leaders of residency programs are never told these amounts, apparently because their hospital executives kept the amounts secret. Many of those educators who have tried to find out the figures were unsuccessful. Some did not even try to find out based on beliefs that their attempts would be unsuccessful, any amounts they discovered would be inaccurate, the people who knew the amounts were hidden, or that it would be dangerous to their careers to even try.

Thus billions of dollars of money flowing from the government to fund graduate medical education seems to have vanished in an amazing example of widespread deficiencies in accountability and transparency.

There are many people who blame government for many social ills. In this case, one can blame the US Congress for not writing a law that makes the money flows transparent and hospitals accountable for providing good educational value for the money provided. One can also blame the executive branch, particularly the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) of the US Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) for not making the money flows and the values received for them transparent.

There are a few people, including this author, who also blame the leadership of health care organizations for many of the problems besetting health care. In this case, one can blame top leadership, presumably CEOs and chief financial officers (CFOs) of hospitals for hiding the amounts of money they receive from Medicare to finance graduate medical education. One can also blame the physician leaders of residency programs for not insisting that they know the true sources of financial support for their programs, obtain budgets that reflect this support, and recognition that their faculty really do bring in external funds for their teaching of house staff (and are thus valuable "taxpayers" in Dr Goldman's parlance.)

It is amazing that such amounts of money have been flowing for years mostly in secret. The secrecy has fueled incorrect, and in retrospect, bizarre ideas about the funding of medical education, and the value of medical educators to their institutions. This secrecy, in turn, has helped suppress the morale of medical educators, support the control of managers of health care professionals, and distort the flow of money within academic institutions and to compensation for certain favored individuals.

Would our dysfunctional health care system not be better off if we demanded transparency and accountability from its leaders?  In particular, the US government should make payments to hospitals for graduate medical education completely transparent, and develop a system to hold these hospitals accountable for how they spend the money.  Meanwhile, top leaders of hospitals receiving this money should make the amounts transparent, first to the people who are supposed to be doing the education that the money pays for, and to the public at large.  This would allow those running the relevant educational programs to develop reasonable and realistic budgets, to treat their faculty with respect, and to demonstrate what value they provide for the money received. 
The ongoing anechoic effect, and related deception and secrecy fostered by leaders in health care are major reasons our health care system is so dysfunctional, that costs are so high, and access and quality so poor.  True health care reform would ensure health care leaders put the mission before their personal enrichment, and act ethically with accountability, transparency, and honesty. 
References
1.   DeAngelis CD. Professors not professing. JAMA 2004; 292: 1060-1.  Link here.
2.  Goldman L, Halm EA.  A view from the top: general internal medicine from the perspective of a chair and dean.  SGIM Forum, April, 2007.  Link here.
3.  Pololi L, Ash A, Krupat E.  Faculty Values in the Culture of Academic Medicine: Findings of a National Faculty Survey. Link here.
4.  Liebow M, Jaeger J, Schwartz MD. How does Medicare pay for graduate medical education? SGIM Forum, May, 2012.  Link here.
5. Chaudhry SI, Khanijo S, Halvorsen AJ, McDonald FS,Patel K. Accountability and transparency in graduate medical education expenditures. Am J Med 2012; 125: 517-522. Link here.

Another Cautionary Tale about Conflicts of Interest: the CEO's Stretch Limousine, Golden Parachute, and Slush Fund

It remains fashionable in academic medicine to tolerate, if not celebrate conflicts of interest as necessary to support the "collaboration" needed for "innovation," while minimizing their risks (e.g., look here). 

Recently, another cautionary tale about how conflicts of interest signal the risk of all sorts of unpleasantness has appeared in the media.

A Sentinel Event: the First Conflicts Uncovered

In 2009, we wrote about some conflicts of interest at Wyckoff Heights Medical Center in my hometown of Brooklyn, NY.  The New York Daily News had reported that Dr. Addagada Rao, the hospital's chief of surgery was simultaneously the president and part-owner of a Caribbean medical school that funneled medical students to clerkships at Wyckoff.  The hospital's CEO, Rajiv Garg, was an investor in the same school.  At the time, I wrote,

This story illustrates another twist on conflicts of interest affecting the leaders of not-for-profit health care organizations. Many of the smaller not-for-profit hospitals, of which there are thousands in the US, may have minimal conflict of interest policies, which may be minimally enforced, without much transparency or accountability. The coziness of the leadership culture of such smaller institutions may preclude anyone within the culture from asking tough questions. The results may be total confusion as to whose interests particular leaders are serving. In particular, the interests of each hospital's patients may get lost in the shuffle. In this case, the interests of medical students may also get lost in the shuffle. Although the institutions involved may be small, and hence the conflicts may seem small in terms of their monetary value, they aggregate to contribute to the moral miasma that now is the atmosphere of health care.

You heard it here first.

The CEO's Golden Parachute

Fast forward to 2012. In January, the Daily News again reported that CEO Garg had been ousted, but that

Trustees at Wyckoff Heights Medical Center asked to consider a whopping $875,000 severance payout for its former CEO are balking at the package....

It seems that Garg's attorney claimed

They were on the verge of bankruptcy when he arrived. He reduced the debt by tens of millions of dollars.

However,

the hospital’s financial situation remains grim. According to the work group’s final report, Wyckoff’s liabilities are $91 million greater than its assets and it is saddled with $114 million in long-term debt.

So here is yet another example of a CEO personally profiting while his or her organization's finances fester.

The Chauffeured Cars, the Stretch Limousine

The the Daily News began chipping away at the other ways CEO Garg benefited from his leadership of the fiscally troubled hospital. A notable symbol of these benefits was a stretch limousine:

The ousted CEO of a debt-riddled Brooklyn hospital had his security guards ferry friends to the U.S. Open and his wife around town in a stretch limo, the Daily News has learned.

Rajiv Garg, the disgraced honcho of Wyckoff Heights Medical Center, also enjoyed his own commutes in the hospital-issued ride — a sleek, black $33,000 Lincoln Royale.

Garg rolled in style,

The beleaguered hospital bought the fancy car — equipped with a mini-bar, four champagne flutes and a fridge for chilling Dom Pérignon — last summer for Garg It also owned two other cars for his use, sources said.

Several times a week, the limo was dispatched to take Garg’s wife from her job near the hospital to the couple’s midtown apartment, said an employee.

Sometimes, it picked her up and then swung by the hospital to get Garg and whisk them to dinner before dropping them home, sources said. Two or three times a month, the limo picked her up at home and took her shopping.

'I haven’t had a raise in seven years,' said the employee. 'They always tell us they don’t have any money. They spent it on cars.'

The limo has comfy leather seats with room to spare for six passengers and a stereo system capable of drowning out highway noise when Garg and his wife were driven in it to Washington.

More Conflicts of Interest Discovered

Then the Daily News started to reveal conflicts of interest beyond the ones we discussed in 2009:

Then-trustee Frank Chiarello was in a partnership that loaned money to hospital entities, according to a list of board members’ conflicts the Daily News eyeballed. The $2.5 million loan had an 18% interest rate, sources said, costing the hospital hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Chiarello, a real estate exec, resigned from the board last week.

Another trustee who quit the board last week, attorney John Rucigay, serves as a lawyer for other trustees, owns real estate with other trustees, and rents space to the Polish and Slavic Federal Credit Union — whose head of operations is yet another Wyckoff trustee, Agnieszka Poslednik.

Additional trustees on the conflicts list first reported by Crain’s New York Business, include Andrew Boiselle, whose Cebco Check Cashing Corp. does check-cashing business with hospital employees, and attorney Fred Haller, who provides legal services to Wyckoff employees about issues not related to the hospital.

Slush Funds and Bribes

Last week, the Daily News reported about findings by a judge that the CEO kept slush funds used to pay bribes:

Wyckoff Heights Medical Center kept a secret bank account that a former CEO used to bribe a disgraced state assemblyman, an upstate judge said in a court decision.

Orange County Supreme Court Judge Elaine Slobod’s decisionk brought to light new details about the Bushwick hospital’s alleged dealings with Tony Seminerio (D-Far Rockaway), who died in a North Carolina prison last year.

The bank account used for the Stockholm St. hospital’s payoffs to the corrupt pol belonged to 397 Himrod Corporation.

Former Wyckoff board chairman Emil Rucigay originally set up the company to buy real estate for the hospital to turn into a parking lot, the judge’s order said.

The bank account was kept active — though the corporation was dissolved in 2001. The bank account still had approximately $130,000 in it in 2008.

“[Wyckoff’s] CEO was using monies in the Himrod account to bribe Seminerio,” Slobad wrote in her decision last week, referring to Dominick Gio, who was the hospital’s head honcho at the time.

Gio refused to talk a reporter last week. Wcykoff’s interim CEO Ramon Rodriguez also declined to comment.

Money from the Himrod account was used to make payments totaling $15,000 to Seminerio, other court filings charge.

A Lexus, a Bentley, Oh My

Then the story really hit the big time when the New York Times picked it up yesterday. That report added some colorful details about how magnificently the CEO traveled:

In August 2009, Mr. Garg said, he fell asleep at the wheel and crashed his Lexus into a truck. He then lost his license. Asked why in the interview, he said he was not certain, though he offered several explanations, including unpaid tickets and previous accidents.

He then used the hospital’s cars — a Lincoln Town Car and a Cadillac Escalade — for himself and his family around the clock. They were driven by two security guards on overtime, a hospital official said.

He parked his other car, the $160,000 Bentley, at Wyckoff and had the hospital put the vehicle on its own insurance policy.

The limo only came later,

Mr. Garg said in the interview that he suspected that the drivers of the Town Car and the Escalade were eavesdropping on his conversations. So he had the hospital purchase a used stretch limousine for about $33,000.

Yet More Conflicts of Interest Discovered

The Times story also found more conflicts of interest. Some involved CEO Garg:

Mr. Garg introduced hospital officials to Skyscape, a provider of mobile medical references, in which he had a financial interest. Wyckoff signed a contract with the company worth at least $38,700, hospital records show, though the deal eventually fell through.

Others involved hospital trustees. This example might have affected patient care at the hospital:

Dr. Theophine Abakporo arrived at Wyckoff in 1996 from Harlem Hospital to work in emergency medicine. Originally from Nigeria, he said he found his way to the top blocked by what he believed was a clique of doctors at Wyckoff.

In 2009, according to data provided by MapLight.org, Dr. Abakporo, an American citizen, began donating money to the campaign of Representative Edolphus Towns, the Democrat who represents a nearby area. Mr. Towns, a longtime board member of Wyckoff, had by then been replaced by his chief of staff, Albert Wiltshire, on the board.

Dr. Abakporo gave $1,000 to the Towns campaign, then $750, according to election records.

With Mr. Wiltshire’s support, Dr. Abakporo became chairman of emergency medical services.

This example might also have affected patient care:

With his solicitous manner and tailored sport jackets, Gary Goffner, a pharmacist who serves on Wyckoff’s board, has long endeared himself to customers and doctors alike.

He inherited his pharmacy, Kraupner, from his father, a prominent Bushwick landlord as well as a pharmacist, who died recently. It is an old-fashioned store, crammed with supplies, the opposite of an orderly Rite Aid.

It is also a half-mile walk from Wyckoff, a disadvantage Mr. Goffner overcame through a contract that gave him exclusive access to Wyckoff patients as they were being discharged, and allowed him to keep an employee at the hospital to promote his business.

In summary, the Times found,

According to internal hospital documents, 13 of the hospital’s 22 board members declared at least one conflict of interest.

Summary

So, from a single story about conflicts of interest affecting the CEO and a medical leader at the hospital, we have gone to stories about widespread conflicts of interest affecting the hospital's board and leadership, about lavish payments and benefits to the CEO while the hospital's finances suffered, and allegations (by a judge) of bribes and slush funds. 

Recall that the Institute of Medicine's report on conflicts of interest in medicine and health care defined conflicts of interest as “circumstances that create a risk that professional judgments or actions regarding a primary interest will be unduly influenced by a secondary interest.” While no particular conflict of interest is guaranteed to cause someone to abuse entrusted power, conflicts of interest create the risk of such abuse. The case of the leadership and governance of Wyckoff Heights Medical Center shows how such risks may manifest.

Yet we have noted again and again how leaders of supposedly mission-oriented non-profit medical organizations seem to be ignoring these risks while pursuing ever more money from health care corporations. We noted how the Chancellor of the University of California-San Francisco "has no qualms" about faculty's financial relationships with industry. Just this week at Brown University, my alma mater, while discussing a new conflicts of interest policy, we heard,

'People do have conflicts of interest, and it’s not the end of the world,' said Janet Blume, associate dean of the faculty.

Conflicts of interest may not lead to the apocalypse. However, they certainly may lead to all sorts of unpleasantness. As Joe Collier stated, “people who have conflicts of interest often find giving clear advice (or opinions) particularly difficult." Conflicts of interest clearly lead to conflicted, and confused thinking, and such thinking may lead to bad decisions, and hence bad outcomes for patients' and the public's health. Worse, as the IOM asserted, conflicts of interest are a risk factor for outright corruption.

True health care reform might start with a reasoned discussion, based as much as possible on evidence, about the risks as well as the supposed benefits of conflicts of interest affecting those who make decisions about individual patients' health care, and about public health and health care policy.

Elephants We Can Notice But Cannot Name

We have often discussed the anechoic effect, how cases involving or discussions of the topics we address on Health Care Renewal, the concentration and abuse of power in health care, fail to produce any responses, or echoes. 

Last month, an article with the provocative title, "Elephants in Academic Medicine," by Souba et al addressed the anechoic effect, but was unable to discuss what people in academic medicine cannot discuss.(1)

"Organizational Silence"

In summary, the authors surveyed chairs of departments of medicine and surgery at all accredited US medical schools to ask about the "elephants in their living rooms." By this they meant the problems which people are unwilling to discuss at their medical schools.  Their goal was to assess "organizational silence" in academic medicine, as they discussed in their introduction:

Morrison and Milliken popularized the term 'organizational silence,' which refers to the collective-level phenomenon of doing or saying very little about the problems facing an organization. Organizational silence derives both from people's fears of negative feedback and from a set of behavioral cues adopted by supervisors that lead to structures, procedures, and processes that discourage speaking up. Two common structural features of organizations that foster organizational silence are centralized decision making and a lack of formal feedback mechanisms.

Some organizations face an apparent dilemma in which employees know the truth about specific problems within the organization yet dare not speak that truth to their superiors. A key factor that fosters the creation of a climate of organizational silence is senior leaders' fears of receiving criticism, especially from subordinates. The unwritten message from the top is 'No bad or unpleasant news.' Fearing retaliation or the label 'not a team player' if they speak their minds, subordinates become silent; even if they do speak up, they may discover that their feedback is disregarded. A culture of silence becomes ingrained.

Methods

The investigators sought to learn from these academic leaders:

(1) What are the major elephants in your AHC [academic health center]? (2) What do you believe to be the most prevalent reasons people do not speak up? and (3) What are the consequences of remaining silent?

The survey response rate was 55%. The major elephants, in the order that they were ranked by the participants, were
- misalignment between goals and available resources
- ignoring information that clearly indicates a performance problem
- unwillingness to give up on a failed strategy
- unwillingness to speak up about inequities (e.g., pay, space, favoritism, special deals)
- failure to deal with disruptive behavior

The wording of these items were chosen by the investigators. The survey allowed for respondents to write in additional items, but the paper did not discuss any such responses. Its discussion of the results did not further define the nature of any elephants.

In addition, survey results suggested that more open discussion is unlikely to be in the offing.

- The majority of respondents thought that the elephants were someone else's problem:

Both chairs of surgery and of medicine believed that elephants are more commonly ignored by deans and hospital leaders than by other department chairs or themselves. Surgery chairs were more likely to say that hospital leaders ignore elephants, whereas medicine chairs were more likely to say that deans disregard elephants.

- The majority thought that other leaders did not encourage discussion of elephants:

Only 52 of the chairs (37%) said that elephants are usually discussed in an appropriate venue, whereas 87 (63%) said that elephants are discussed in less constructive venues or not discussed at all. Less than a quarter of the chairs (32; 23%) reported that the top leaders at their institutions actually encourage people to call out and deal with elephants. More commonly, the chairs (77; 55%) reported that the top leaders of their institutions say they want people to be frank about elephants, but their actions or nonverbal cues indicate otherwise. A higher percentage of medicine chairs than of surgery chairs (16 of 53 [30%] versus 16 of 86 [19%]), said that top leaders pretend that elephants do not exist.

- An important minority did not think the elephants were a problem at all:

nearly a fifth (26 of 139; 19%) agreed that, indeed, some issues are best left undiscussed.

- While the majority favored discussing elephants, they did not think it would be easy to do so:

two-thirds (92 of 137; 67%) felt that creating a culture in which elephants are openly discussed would be very or moderately difficult.

Their and Our Discussion

It was particularly striking that an article about elephants in the living room did not more fully describe what sorts of elephants they were. The descriptions of elephants above, taken verbatim from the survey instrument, were vague. They were not clarified in the discussion section of the article.

Particularly lacking were the sort of nasty elephants described by Pololi et al in a qualitative study of barriers to the advancement of primary care faculty.(2) As we summarized in our letter,(3) these elephants included academic leaders who put revenues ahead of patient care, teaching, and research; and who allegedly used deception for personal gain. Also lacking were nasty elephants we have discussed on Health Care Renewal. We have discussed examples of self-interested, conflicted, and corrupt leadership of health care organizations, including academic medical institutions.

I am glad that Souba et al brought up the topic of elephants in academic medicine's living room. However, I am disappointed that these elephants were never clearly identified. It seems that while we are getting to the point of being able to say there are things we cannot say, we are not yet at the point of saying what those things are. The strength of the anechoic effect is demonstrated by cases in which we cannot talk about what we cannot talk about.

Souba et al concluded:

We believe that AHCs are designed, often subconsciously, to keep the range of conversation limited to a few voices, usually the voices of those in power. The powerful silence the voices of others because they consider others' views to be either contrary to the status quo or of limited value.

We would add that those in power often may value the status quo not merely because of philosophical conservatism, but because maintaining the status quo supports their self interest. In particular, it has become increasingly lucrative to be in a leadership position in a health care organization, even in a non-profit academic institution. Executive compensation at these institutions has been rising inexorably, driven by increasing institutional relationships with corporate health care. Individuals in leadership positions in academic medicine frequently have their own, increasingly lucrative financial relationships with the health care industry. (A study by Campbell et al showed that the majority of department chairs, like those who answered the survey above, have such relationships.[4]) Ever increasing hunger for institutional and personal revenue may lead to a variety of practices that are hostile to the academic and professional mission.  Discussing any of these aspects of the status quo may offend and threaten those who are profiting from it. 

However, as long as we cannot even talk about such problems, the problems will only get worse.

References


1. Souba W, Way D, Lucey C, Sedmak D, Notestine M. Acad Medicine 2011; 86: 1492-1499.  Link here.
2. Pololi L, Kern DE, Carr P, Conrad P, Knight S. The culture of academic medicine: faculty perceptions of the lack of alignment between individual and institutional values. J Gen Intern Med 2009; 24: 1289-95. Link here.
3. Poses RM, Smith WR. Faculty values. J Gen Intern Med 2010; 25: 646. Link here.
4.  Campbell EG, Weissman JS, Ehringhaus S et al. Institutional academic-industry relationships. JAMA 2007; 298: 1779-1786, link here.]

If a Medical School is Just Part of the "Biomedical Industry," Who Will Do Medical Education?

A little while ago, we discussed questions raised by the pre-existing financial relationships of Dr Laurie Glimcher, the new incoming Dean of Weill Cornell Medical School. Dr Glimcher is also the longest serving director of Bristol-Myers-Squibb, and has a number of other financial relationships with drug and device companies.

A new interview with Dr Glimcher suggested that what is most interesting about the coverage of her ascension to the Cornell Deanship is what it did not mention, especially whether she has any goals other than promote relationships with and do product development for corporate health care.

So let me review what has been made public about the interests and goals of Weill Cornell Medical College's new Dean.

The New York Times: To Develop "Research Capacity" and a "New High-Tech Campus"

The New York Times article focused on the new Dean's conflicts of interests, but found no doubts about these conflicts among the university leadership to whom the new Dean would report. Instead,

Cornell University’s president, Dr. David J. Skorton, said he believed Dr. Glimcher had the skills to carry out the medical school’s plan to double its research capacity and to help the university compete to develop a new high-tech campus proposed by the Bloomberg administration.

However, while it emphasized how university leaders defended Dr Glimcher's conflicts of interest, the New York Times article said nothing about the university leadership's educational or clinical expectations for Dr Glimcher.

The Cornell Sun: To "Strengthen its Relationship with Biotechnology and Pharmaceutical Companies"

Similarly, according to the Cornell Daily Sun, the university leadership regarded the new Dean's relationships with industry as strengths, not weaknesses,

As the longest-standing member of the corporate board of biopharmaceutical company Bristol-Myers Squibb, [Dr Laurie] Glimcher has 'extensive experience' in corporate finance, governance and management, according to a University press release.

So,

Under Glimcher’s leadership, Weill hopes to strengthen its relationship with biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies, develop innovative cures and bolster research, the University stated.

The Sun did briefly note,

In a press release, [Cornell University President David J] Skorton said he was 'honored and delighted' that Glimcher accepted the position.

'Her passion for accomplishment and her many research and clinical strengths make her ideally suited to build on Tony Gotto’s strong foundation and lead Weill Cornell’s bright future in clinical care, education and translational research,' Skorton said.

However, there were no further details about what Dr Glimcher would do for clinical care or education.

The Cornell Press Release: To Achieve "Preeminence in the Biomedical Sciences"

This press release emphasized Dr Glimcher's corporate skills even more than did the Times or Sun articles,

Her service with the biopharmaceutical company Bristol-Myers Squibb, where she is the longest-standing member of the corporate board of directors and of its audit committee, has afforded her extensive experience in management oversight, corporate governance, corporate finance, accountability, leadership and the practical aspects of running a business and bringing therapeutics to the marketplace.

'This is great news for the medical school and for the city,' said Sanford I. Weill, chairman of the medical college's board of overseers and a member of the board of trustees of Cornell University. 'With her thorough appreciation of the management and financial challenges of complex organizations, I am confident she will lead the college with the same creativity and acumen she demonstrated when she pioneered the establishment of Bristol-Myers' science and technology committee, which is widely credited for transforming its stake in research. With a state-of-the-art biomedical research facility under construction and Dr. Glimcher at the helm, Weill Cornell and New York are on course to achieve a preeminence in the biomedical sciences that has already been achieved in clinical medicine and first-rate medical education.'

However, it said nothing substantive about Dr Glimcher's educational or clinical goals or interests. (Perhaps, because Mr Weill thought that the school had already achieved preeminence in these areas, he also thought no further goals in these areas are needed.)

Crain's New York Business: "Critical that the Pharmaceutical Industry has Input from the Biomedical Industry"

Now Crain's New York Business just published an interview with Dr Laurie Glimcher, the Dean to be of the Weill Cornell Medical College with a singular emphasis.  It introduced Dr Glimcher thus,

She is the longest-serving member of the board at Bristol-Myers Squibb and has been a big earner from her work with drug companies. Snaring Dr. Glimcher is a coup for Cornell University, which is using her status to bolster its proposal to build a science and engineering campus on Roosevelt Island.

The interviewer asked, can New York become "a more competitive research hub?"  Dr Glimcher opined,

I think New York City is going to be the next greatest center for biomedical research.

Then, with an instructive tilt, why are you so comfortable taking research funding from drug makers?  Her answer included the usual rationale, but with a twist:

I think it's critical that the pharmaceutical industry has input from the biomedical industry. I believe it is essential to have partnerships to accomplish our goals.

The implication, and the twist is that she apparently sees herself as leading not a medical college, but an entity within the "biomedical industry."

The next question was, does this mean that more collaboration with drug companies are ahead for Weill Cornell?  Her answer was no surprise,

Harvard probably has more ties to pharmaceutical companies than Weill Cornell, but Weill Cornell definitely has connections that I hope we can leverage.

At this point, it should be no surprise that this interview of this erstwhile leader of "biomedical industry" mentioned nothing substantive about clinical care or medical education.

Summary: Education and Patient Care Disappear into the Maw of the "Biomedical Industry"

In summary, so far, all the hoopla about the new Dean of Weill Cornell Medical College has been about her anticipated ability to align the school with the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industry. Amidst the hoopla, neither the new Dean nor anyone within the Cornell leadership has said anything about her interests, goals, or positions relevant to education or clinical care. Yet education is the most fundamental mission of a medical school and of academic medicine. Instead, on one occasion, the new Dean suggested that she would be leading not a medical school, but part of the "biomedical industry."

So it appears that the brave new version of the Weill Cornell Medical College is not merely more focused on doing product development for industry than on its traditional mission of education, research more broadly defined, (e.g., which also may include basic biomedical research, clinical research, and epidemiological and public health research), and patient care. It appears that applied research for product development has become its only important goal. How else should one interpret what the new Dean and her supervisors have said? Not one of them has said anything about education or patient care other than to acknowledge that these endeavors exist.  (Also, not one of them discussed the other kinds of research that medical schools and academic medical centers have traditionally done.)

If Cornell's Board Chairman, President, and Medical College Dean are only interested in being part of the "biomedical industry," why should anyone want to attend what is still called their "Medical College?" Why should anyone want to serve as a house officer in one of the "Medical College's" hospitals? Why should anyone want to attend one of the "Medical College's" continuing medical education courses? If Cornell's Board Chairman, President, and Medical College Dean are only interested in being part of the "biomedical industry," that is, doing applied research for product development, why would any patient want to go to their hospital,s clinics, and other facilities?

We now see not merely academic medical leadership chosen because of, not despite their conflicts of interest with health care corporations. We now also see academic medical leadership who appear only interested in corporate product development, and not even interested in talking about education or patient care (or traditional biomedical, clinical, and epidemiological research.)

Of course, all this discussion is based only what has been published so far about the new leadership of Weill Cornell. Maybe the publications have been woefully incomplete and full of errors. I eagerly hope that to be the case (nooffense intended to the journalists involved.) But I fear that we are seeing the final common pathway for the corporate academic medical center, its transformation into the "Biomedical Industry."

If academic medical leaders no longer care about education or patient care, the downward spiral of our health care system has only just begun.

Academic Medicine Deploys a Logical Fallacy to Avoid Disclosing Inconvenient Truths

We recently discussed a simultaneous retreat from aggressive regulation and enforcement applied to big health care corporations by US government agencies.  Now a story published by Bloomberg (currently available without a subscription here on PharmaGossip) showed that the push for less disclosure of relationships with industry that generated conflicts of interest for academic medicine came not from industry, but from ... academic medicine:

The lobby for Harvard University and other research institutions drove the Obama administration to weaken draft rules for scientists to disclose potential conflicts of interest, according to U.S. records and watchdog groups.

In particular,

Universities objected to draft rules in a letter to NIH and in meetings with officials at the White House Office of Management and Budget, approver of the final version, said Carrie Wolinetz, associate vice president for federal relations at the Association of American Universities that represents 61 research universities.

Also,

The letter was co-signed with the Association of American Medical Colleges, American Council on Education and Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities.

The one example of the universities' reasoning to justify their objections to greater disclosure of conflicts of interest was striking.

Wolinetz’s organization wrote in the letter that 'there is a paucity of evidence that the disclosure and management of financial conflicts of interest affect objectivity and integrity.'

Recall that the disclosure to which they objected would be by federally funded researchers, and of financial relationships with organizations that had vested interests related to the particular research projects. The Institute of Medicine's landmark report, "Conflict of Interest in Medical Research, Education and Practice,"  stated:

Disclosure of financial relationships with industry is an essential, though limited, first step in identifying and responding to conflicts of interest.

One could also argue, as did Senator Grassley, (see here) that disclosure is owed to the tax-payers who support the research.

On the other hand, I do not think anyone would argue that disclosure and the ill-defined "management" proposed by the NIH would be sufficient to guarantee "objectivity and integrity" of the research.

In fact, the IOM report called for going far beyond disclosure.  Specifically, it called for banning most conflicts affecting most clinical research:

researchers should not conduct research involving human participants if they have a financial interest in the outcome of the research

This goes far beyond what the original NIH revision of its conflict of interest rules mandated. However, I am sure that banning such relationships was the last thing that the AAU and AAMC wanted.

So the academic institutions' argument seems to be a variant on the false dilemma logical fallacy. If the only alternative to doing nothing about conflicts of interest is disclosure, and if disclosure is really a poor solution to the problem, than perhaps doing nothing makes sense. However, if disclosure is just a necessary first step, as the IOM asserted, then it is a first step that should be taken in preparation for other steps to come.

Note that the academic institutions' argument also seems to be a version of what has been called the Nirvana fallacy, or the perfect is the enemy of the good fallacy. That is, if what one can do does not result in Nirvana, then one should do nothing.

Finally, in this case the academic medical institutions' argument seemed too extreme even for their pharmaceutical industry supporters. As the Bloomberg article reported,

Researchers have been lax making financial disclosures and there’s been an absence of oversight, said Peter Pitts, president of the Center for Medicine in the Public Interest, a nonprofit research institute in New York. 'When you don’t properly disclose, you give the impression that you’re trying to hide something.'

Institutes should instead disclose all financial interests without trying to judge whether they are conflicts, Pitts said.

As we have discussed previously, Peter Pitts' main occupation has been as a leader in public relations for the pharmaceutical industry. He is currently a senior partner, director, global regulatory & health policy for Porter Novelli. Even though we have previously criticized Pitts for deploying logical fallacies in support of industry positions, in this case the academic medical institutions' argument was too much for him to support.

So we have come this far. Universities are ostensibly about finding and disseminating the truth. Yet universities' academic medical subsidiaries now deploy illogic to avoid revealing particular truths that they find uncomfortable, and which might raise questions about relationships with industry that are increasingly lucrative. Universities seem now willing to jettison their mission to make more money.

True health care reform would require academic medicine to put its mission ahead of its revenues.

What Goes Up - Non-Profit Hospital CEO Compensation Continues to Defy Gravity

We have frequently discussed the disconnect between incentives, particularly total compensation, given to the leaders of health care organizations and their roles, or lack thereof, in improving the health care of their patients or the public. One measure of that disconnect is how leaders' pay continues to defy gravity while the economy continues to suffer, and health care dysfunction continues to fester.

In particular, total compensation given to CEOs of ostensibly not-for-profit hospitals and hospital systems is increasingly passing the magic $1 million mark. A round up including two recent articles and others from the last four months that we have not discussed before revealed more "million dollar babies" amongst the ranks of these leaders.  (Note that most of the data came from 2009, not a particularly good year for the economy as a whole.)

UA Healthcare, Phoenix area, Arizona - $1.7 million

As reported by the Arizona Daily Star in April, "UA Healthcare interim CEO Kevin Burns received a financial package worth about $1.7 million when he left his post last week, the chairman of the UA Healthcare board said. Under terms of his contract, Burns qualified for two years' base pay plus benefits when he left his position. His annual base pay as interim CEO was $620,000, said Granger Vinall, UA Healthcare board chair."

Baptist Health, Jacksonville area, Florida - $1.2 million

According to the Florida Times-Union in May, Hugh Green, CEO of the Baptist Health system, made $1.2 million.

Florida Hospital Waterman, Orlando area, Florida - $1.7 million

As reported by the Orlando Sentinel in May, in 2009, Ken Mattison, president and CEO of Florida Hospital Waterman had total compensation of $1.7 million, which included "a lump sum pay-out of pension monies."

Multiple hospitals, Boston, Massachusetts - $1.2 - $2.1 million

According to an August Boston Globe article, in 2009, reported salaries of CEOs at Boston hospitals including: for the late CEO of Partners HealthCare, "then-chief executive James J. Mongan earned a total of $2.1 million, including salary, bonus, and other compensation"; for CEOs of two Partners hospitals, "current Partners chief executive, Gary L. Gottlieb, earned $1.6 million in 2009 as president of Brigham and Women’s, the same amount he got in 2008. Peter L. Slavin, president of Mass. General, earned $1.4 million in 2009, also the same as the year before"; "Elaine S. Ullian, former chief executive of Boston Medical Center, a Boston University teaching hospital, drew total compensation of $1.8 million in 2009"; and "Tufts Medical Center paid its chief executive, Ellen M. Zane, about $1.2 million in 2009, equal to her 2008 compensation."

Multiple hospitals, mid-west US - $1.8 - $6 million

Per MedCity News in August, "Nine percent of nonprofit hospital chief executives in the Midwest are paid more than $1 million a year, according to a new report." The top 20 CEOs in terms of compensation, based on the latest (2008 or 2009) figures were:

Randall O’Donnell; Children’s Mercy Hospital and Clinics; Kansas City, Missouri: $6 million
Javon Bea; Mercy Health System; Janesville, Wisconsin: $4.5 million
James Skogsbergh; Advocate Health Care; Oak Brook, Illinois: $4 million
Dean Harrison; Northwestern Memorial Hospital; Chicago, Illinois: $3.4 million
Richard Pettingill; Allina Health System; Minneapolis, Minnesota: $3.3 million
Joseph Swedish; Trinity Health; Novi, Michigan: $2.7 million
Lowell Kruse; Heartland Regional Medical Center; St. Joseph, Missouri: $2.5 million
Steven Lipstein; BJC Health System; St. Louis, Missouri: $2.2 million
Kevin Schoeplein; OSF Healthcare System; Peoria, Illinois: $2.2 million
Thomas Sieber; Genesis Healthcare System; Zanesville, Ohio: $2.1 million
Paul Pawlak; Silver Cross Hospital; Joliet, Illinois: $2 million
Toby Cosgrove; Cleveland Clinic; Cleveland, Ohio: $1.9 million
William Petasnick; Froedtert Memorial Hospital; Milwaukee, Wisconsin: $1.9 million
Fred Manchur; Kettering Medical Center; Dayton, Ohio: $1.9 million
Patrick Magnon; Children’s Memorial Hospital; Chicago, Illinois: $1.8 million
Kenneth Hanover; University Hospital; Cincinnati, Ohio: $1.8 million
J. Luke McGuinness; Central Dupage Hospital; Winfield, Illinois: $1.8 million
Daniel Evans Jr.; Clarian Health Partners; Indianapolis, Indiana: $1.8 million
James Madera; University of Chicago Medical Center; Chicago, Illinois: $1.8 million
James Anderson; Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center; Cincinnati, Ohio: $1.8 million

Where All CEOs Are Above Average

A repeated theme of these articles was that CEO pay continues to rise because those who set it often seem to believe that their CEOs, like the children of mythical Lake Woebegone, are above average, or at least that they are never below average. For example, in the Arizona Star article we learn:

UMC Corp. raised Burns' pay after consulting with a third-party compensation and benefits expert, and the salary is in approximately the 25th percentile when compared to like institutions on a national basis, [UA Healthcare board of trustees chair Granger] Vinall said. He said that UA Healthcare board's approved policy is to pay in the 50th percentile

In addition, in the [Jacksonville, FL] Times-Union article we find this about Baptist CEO Hugh Greene:

He deserves more because he doesn't just manage one hospital, said Robert Hill, chairman of the Baptist board. Greene oversees a complex health system that includes four adult hospitals, a children's hospital, a large physician network and other subsidiaries.

'We think he's an exceptional CEO,' said Hill, CEO of sales and marketing company Acosta.

That article also included this summary:

hospital boards, which usually consist of community heavy-hitters and local business leaders, often rely on consultants to help set CEO pay.

'The consultants survey the field, looking at salaries of CEOs at nonprofit and for-profit institutions, see what the 50th percentile is and then in many cases offer 20 percent or 30 percent above to qualified candidates,' Maggie Mahar of the nonpartisan think tank the Century Foundation wrote in a recent blog.

There's a problem with this system, she added: 'Mathematically, this keeps the 50th percentile moving up, and what the IRS considers 'reasonable' also moves up.'

Furthermore, the report on mid-west CEOs in the MedCity News provided this opaquely worded corroboration:

'It seems there is a possibility that when executive compensation firms are hired by boards and/or CEOs to provide multiple examples of comparable compensation, the firms may report out the higher end of the comparables,' said Pamela Knecht, president of Accord Limited, a Chicago-based healthcare governance consulting firm, in the report.

Summary

I am willing to admit that it may make sense to set compensation for hospital (and other health care) leaders in the context of what the population of such leaders are paid.  However, it makes no logical sense for the boards of trustees who set non-profit hospital CEOs' pay to deny the possibility that some of these CEOs must be below average.  Yet boards never seem to allow that their CEOs could be below average at the times when the pay decisions are made.  The only times we seem to hear about less than average CEOs are when their performance has been publicly embarrassing enough for them to lose their jobs, if not go to jail.  Even in such situations, the bad behavior never seems to have been foreshadowed in any way, particularly not by previous pay cuts (see this post for recent examples.) 

So why do hospital (and other health care) boards seem to deny the possibility that their CEOs may be below average, or worse?  As we have discussed before, perhaps it is due to ego bias.  Judgment and decision psychologists have shown that people often overestimate their own performance, or the performance of those with whom they are affiliated.  Also, the boards of trustees who are supposed to steward hospitals and other health care non-profits are often made up of current or retired CEOs or other top leaders of other organizations.  They may overestimate the performance of fellow members of the C-level officers' guild, or be afraid to criticize it.

In any case, we are seeing more and more flagrant examples of the perverse incentives existing in health care, especially as given to health care leaders, resulting in worsening accountability and increasing sense of entitlement.  So I say again.... 

Health care organizations need leaders that uphold the core values of health care, and focus on and are accountable for the mission, not on secondary responsibilities that conflict with these values and their mission, and not on self-enrichment. Leaders ought to be rewarded reasonably, but not lavishly, for doing what ultimately improves patient care, or when applicable, good education and good research. On the other hand, those who authorize, direct and implement bad behavior ought to suffer negative consequences sufficient to deter future bad behavior.


If we do not fix the severe problems affecting the leadership and governance of health care, and do not increase accountability, integrity and transparency of health care leadership and governance, we will be as much to blame as the leaders when the system collapses.

"We're Only In It for the Money" - Big Businesses Pretending to be Medical Schools Discussed in Main-Stream Medical Journal

This is a first, the contention that medical schools are only in it for the money has appeared in a prestigious, main-line, large-circulation medical journal(1). The author started by noting that medical schools are now academic in name only.

US medical schools have evolved into big businesses that derive most of their income by providing healthcare services and securing extramural research grants. In 2009, for example, 53% of medical school revenues came from clinical services and 29% from extramural grants. By comparison, less than 4% came from tuition.

These big businesses disguised as academic institutions behave like other big businesses:

Academic medical centers vie for clinical market share through direct-to-consumer advertising. To increase referrals, they offer free continuing medical education that boost the visibility of their most profitable services to community providers. Physicians with MBA degrees are becoming increasing common at academic medical centers....

Then University of Utah cardiology professor Matthew Movsesian clearly asserted that faculty realize that they are only valued for the money they bring in:

It's worth noting that medical school faculty members perceive that their-revenue-generating activities are of paramount importance in the eyes of academic leadership. In a recent survey of US medical schools, 51% of respondents agreed that 'the administration is only interested in me for the revenue I generate'; a less extreme statement might have elicited [even] more widespread concurrence.

Emphasis on revenue generation by faculty is evident in the incentive plans that typically compensate clinicians in proportion to the billable services they provide. And researchers understand that their salaries for time spent on research must be paid, sometimes in full, from extramural grants.

Dr Movsesian implied who the main beneficiaries of this revenue generation are:

Executives at these teaching institutions are paid industry-level salaries.

All of this should be familiar to those who have been reading Health Care Renewal.  We first wrote about how medical school leaders mainly evaluated faculty by their revenue generation, and dismissed those who did not generate sufficient revenue as "welfare recipients," here in 2007.  We discussed the survey that revealed that medical school faculty realize their supervisors only value their revenue generation here in 2010.  But the first post was derived from an interview in the SGIM newsletter, and the survey noted above so far is only publicly available in an on-line abstract.  To my knowledge, the notion that medical schools have abandoned their primary mission of discovering and disseminating the truth in favor of making money, perhaps mainly for the benefit of their top leaders, has not heretofore appeared in a main-stream medical or health care journal.  So this new publication marks an important weakening of the anechoic effect.

Late in 2010, we discussed an important new report in the Lancet about the reform of global health care education(2)(see post here).  It hinted at some of the threats to the academic medical mission we have long discussed on Health Care Renewal.  An accompanying editorial stressed the need to uphold the academic mission, implying that it was in some way threatened, but again did not discuss what actually threatened it.(3)(See our post here which listed some of threats that should be considered.  The threats are reprinted in the box below.)  Now the peril to the mission of US medical, and by extension, perhaps global health care education has made it into polite discussion.  Maybe it is not too late to address threats to global health care education before the system collapses from its internal contradictions.

Threats to the Global Health Care Education Mission (the "Thirteen Plagues")

Health Care Renewal, is largely concerned with threats to health care's core values, including threats to the mission of academic medicine, largely from concentration and abuse of power.  The largest set of threats come from the ascendancy of financial goals amidst the commercialization of health care (mentioned briefly both in Frenk et al and the editorial).  

Abandonment of traditional prohibitions of the commercial practice of medicine - In the US, a Supreme Court decision was interpreted to mean that medical societies could no longer regulate the ethics of their members.  Until 1980, the US American Medical Association had  ruled that the practice of medicine should not be "commercialized, nor treated as a commodity in trade."  After then, it ceased trying to maintain this prohibition.  The result was increasing, now rampant commercialization.  See posts  here and here.

Making money takes precedence over education -  A recent survey showing that more than half the faculty at multiple US medical schools felt they were valued more for how much money they brought in than their teaching or patient care abilities (here), confirming previous anecdotal reports (see here). 

The medical school re-imagined as a biotechnology company -  In 2000, a Vice President of the American Association of Medical Colleges(4) wrote that research universities must respond to "societal demands that they become engines of economic development…."  Many universities now defend lax conflict of interest policies with similar arguments.  For more details, go here

Faculty become employees of industry - For numerous examples of this and other kinds of conflicts of interest, go here.  A survey by Campbell et al suggested that approximately two-thirds of medical academics get significant payments from industry.(5)

Academics become "key opinion leaders" paid to market drugs and devices - Marketers regard "key opinion leaders" as salespeople who appear more credible because of their professional guise.  See anecdotal evidence here. 

Control of clinical research given to commercial sponsors - A study by Mello et al showed how universities' grant administrators are willing to sign contracts giving commercial sponsors control over key aspects of human research studies.(6)  See post here. 

Conflicts of interest allow manipulation and suppression of clinical research - Commercially sponsored research design, implementation, and dissemination are often manipulated to favor the sponsor's interests.  When such manipulation fails to produce favorable results, the results may simply be suppressed

Academics take credit for articles written by commercially paid ghost-writers - Such ghost-writing is often part of organized stealth marketing campaigns. 

Whistle blowers are discouraged, or worse, and academic freedom is damaged.  Discussion of some examples of what may happen to whistle blowers is here.  The survey mentioned earlier (here) showed that about one-third of faculty fear they may be punished for speaking  out. 

Leadership of academic medical centers by businesspeople - Ill-informed management may result from leaders who have no background or training in actual health care. 

Leaders of teaching hospitals and universities become millionaires -  A recent example is here, and more may be found here.  Leaders of academic medical centers and the parent universities of medical schools often make more than $1 million a year in the US.  When such amounts are in play, executives may focus more on short-term measures that lead to even more pay than on upholding the mission. 

Medical school leaders become stewards (as members of boards of directors) of for-profit health care corporations - A recent example is here, and a summary of how we discovered this phenomenon in 2006 is here.   The conflict of interest is severe because directors of for-profit corporations are supposed to have unyielding loyalty to the interests of the corporation and its stockholders, although they are frequently accused of acting mainly as cronies of the top hired executives (see here and here).

Leaders of failed finance firms become stewards of academic medicine - We have found numerous examples, recently here, here, and here, of top executives and/or board members of the finance firms who helped bring on the global financial collapse also being trustees of medical schools, academic medical centers, or their parent universities.  Such "stewards" may bring to the academic environment the "greed is good" culture now pervasive in finance. 

Reference
1.  Movsesian M. Intramural conflicts of interest warrant scrutiny, too. Nature Medicine 2011; 17: 21. Link here.
2.  Frenk J, Chen L, Bhutta ZA, Cohen J, Crisp N, Evans T et al. Health professionals for a new century: transforming education to strengthen health systems in an interdependent world.  Lancet 2010; 376: 1923-1958.  Link here.
3.  Horton R. A new epoch for health professionals' education.  Lancet 2010; 376: 1875-7.  Link here.
4. Korn D. Conflicts of interest in biomedical research. JAMA 2000; 284: 2234-2237. Link here.

5. Campbell EG, Gruen RL, Mountford J et al. A national survey of physician–industry relationships. N Engl J Med 2007; 356:1742-1750. Link here.
6. Mello MM, Clarridge BR, Studdert DM. Academic medical centers' standards for clinical-trial agreements with industry. N Engl J Med 2005; 352: 21. Link here.

Title with apologies to the late Frank Zappa.

Dr. Silverstein and Dr. Poses in WSJ: "The Literature Is Hardly Pristine"

I have considered Dr. Roy Poses' Dec. 14, 2010 post "The Lancet Emphasizes the Threats to the Academic Medical Mission" (with its hyperlinks to source posts and articles) an excellent summary of many of the pathologies we address at Healthcare Renewal, especially with regard to the academic mission and the disruption of the integrity of the medical literature by commercial interests. His post is consistent with what might be considered our mission statement:

Addressing threats to health care's core values, especially those stemming from concentration and abuse of power. Advocating for accountability, integrity, transparency, honesty and ethics in leadership and governance of health care.

The Wall Street Journal published the following letter to the editor authored by me today in which I cited and summarized Dr. Poses' accounting of the medical literature's ills.

Unfortunately, the print version cannot contain the hyperlinks as in the aforementioned source post, but I have included them in the reproduced letter below in [brackets]. They are worth reviewing, along with additional links at the aforementioned source post "The Lancet Emphasizes the Threats to the Academic Medical Mission":

April 8, 2011
Wall Street Journal
Letters to the Editor

The Literature Is Hardly Pristine

I find it unfortunate having to inform reader James Reichmann, (Letters, April 1) who prefers his physician to recommend only treatments proven in the "synthesized medical literature," that the very literature on which he wishes his life to depend may be tainted.

As Dr. Roy Poses points out on the Healthcare Renewal Blog, numerous factors common in today's culture can and do corrupt the literature.

The factors include but are not limited to: rampant commercialization of medicine [here, here, here and here], research universities with lax conflict of interest policies [here], faculty as de facto employees of industry through grants [here], academics paid to be "key opinion leaders" to stealth-market drugs and devices [here], control of clinical research given to commercial sponsors [here], conflicts of interest allowing manipulation and suppression of clinical research [here and here], academics taking credit for articles written by commercially paid industry "ghost writers," [here and here], whistleblowing discouraged [here and here], leadership of academic medical centers by business people [here] and medical school leaders becoming stewards (as members of boards of directors) of for-profit health-care corporations [here, here, here and here].

As for me, until the medical literature can be freed of these contaminants, I'd rather trust a well-trained personal physician's good judgment in my own medical care.

Scot Silverstein, M.D.

Drexel University

Philadelphia

I believe it's also worth reviewing my own views on the subject, that the degree of contamination of medical literature is unknown and may be unrecoverable, due to spread of the contaminant vectors to the "experts" who then propagate the disease.

See my Aug. 2009 post "Has Ghostwriting Infected The Experts With Tainted Knowledge, Creating Vectors for Further Spread and Mutation of the Scientific Knowledge Base?" where I raise these questions.

At that post I suggest that while the damage might not be easily recoverable, the practices that lead to contaminated literature must be stopped going forward if true evidence-based medicine is ever to be a reality.

-- SS

4/12/2011 addendum:

Almost predictably, some anonymous person, this time over at the Respectful Insolence blog in commenting on a post there that attacks "naturopathic" medicine, proffered strawman arguments about my piece above in comment #26.

... So Dr. Silverstein thinks that the defects he cites (many of which have been revealed by and hotly debated within the scientific community) are ample justification for tossing out the entirety of research in favor of the sort of "clinical intuition" that's repeatedly been found false over the years

This binary, two-dimensional thinking is quite sad to read, if real. I'll be charitable in saying that the comment does have the "feel" of something contrived, such as received before from corporate sockpuppets.

-- SS

4/13 addendum:

The proprietor of Respectful Insolence assures me that "anonymous" quoted above is not a sockpuppet. My response was basically that before attacking non-anonymous authors by name on the web who in fact (as is clear from my writing here) share similar views on medical quackery, one should contact them first to ensure you truly understand their views.

(In my case, my view is that the "well-trained physicians" of good judgment I wrote of consider the literature critically but are not bound to it, in consideration of the unknown level of its commercialization-based contamination and the variability of individual patient situations. They treat the patient, not the guideline.)

-- SS

Why Would Directors of Health Care Corporations Push for Bigger Pensions for Academic Administrators?

We recently posted about 36 well-paid top executives in the University of California system, including leaders of medical schools, academic medical centers, and public health, who threatened a lawsuit if their pensions were not increased according to what they claim was a promise made to them in 1999.

Riddle me this: why would a group of directors of for-profit corporations that provide health care goods and services. plus a director of a leading biotechnology trade group, and the director of a leading mutual fund family band together to support this demand, thus to push for bigger pensions for these top managers of the University of California system?

Here is a list of the directors, and their corporations:

-  Mark R Laret, director of Varian Medical Systems and Nuance Communications Inc, which provides numerous health care products 
- Dr David Feinberg, director of OSI Systems, whose Spacelabs Healthcare subsidiary manufactures medical devices
- Steven C Currall, director of Leadership in Medicine Inc, which claims to be a leading provider of intelligence about key opinion leaders (KOLs) in medicine and health care.  Its web-site asserts, "IF YOU NEED TO KNOW who are the most prominent, admired, and influential actors in healthcare, how they are interconnected, and why, you need our expertise.  Given how vastly complex are the relationships among providers, researchers, and other significant actors in healthcare, it is vital to focus on key opinion leaders (KOLs) at local, regional, and global levels, and to understand the ties among them."  (Note that we have often discussed how KOLs function as stealth marketers for pharmaceuticals and devices.)

They joined:
-  Robert S Sullivan, PhD - director of BIOCOM, whose web-site asserts it is the" largest regional life science association in the world, representing more than 550 member companies in Southern California."
-  Richard K Lyons, director of iShares, a leading provider of mutual funds.

The answer is simple.  All the corporate directors listed above are also members of the group of 36 litigious executives.  See their name on the list of 36 here in the San Francisco Chronicle.

- Mark R Laret, director of Varian Medical Systems and Nuance Communications Inc, which provides numerous health care products, is also CEO of UCSF Medical Center.
- Dr David Feinberg, director of OSI Systems, whose Spacelabs Healthcare subsidiary manufactures medical devices, is also CEO of the UCLA Hospital System
- Steven C Currall, director of Leadership in Medicine Inc, which claims to be a leading provider of intelligence about key opinion leaders (KOLs) in medicine and health care, is also Dean, and Professor of Management of the University of California - Davis Graduate School of Management.
Robert S Sullivan, PhD - director of BIOCOM, whose web-site asserts it is the" largest regional life science association in the world, representing more than 550 member companies in Southern California, is also Dean of the University of California - San Diego Rady School of Management.

- Richard K Lyons, director of iShares, a leading provider of mutual funds, is also Bank of America Dean and Professor of Business, University of California - Berkeley Haas School of Business.

Their inclusion within the larger group seems ironic, at best.  As corporate directors, they have outside income and have accumulated assets that will likely keep them out of poverty in their old age.  For example, Mr Laret had accumulated the equivalent of 37,168 shares of Varian, and was paid $267,300 a year for his services according to the company's 2010 proxy statement.

Furthermore, for those who directly lead health care institutions, Mr Laret and Dr Feinberg, their memberships on the boards of health care corporations, which imply fiduciary responsibilities to the companies and their stock-holders, conflict with their duties as leaders of academic health care to uphold teaching, research and patient care.  Dean Currall's responsibilities to an organization which seems entirely dedicated to helping drug, device, and biotechnology companies turn health care professionals and academics into stealth marketers at least seems unseemly given that his school is part of a university which also includes a medical school and academic medical center. 

Since our earlier post, it appears that the University of California president will not accede to the demands of the 36, as noted in the San Francisco Chronicle.  Their demands have continued to provoke outrage.  A recent discussion in Inside Higher Ed interviewed Emeritus Professor Helen Henry, a member of the University's Academic Senate, who posited:

the debate as part of a fundamental philosophical disagreement within the university. The signatories to the letter, many of whom are based in medicine or management, have a different view of the university than faculty from other disciplines, she said.

'I don’t think there’s any question but that there are these two different mindsets that are fighting for what the university should be. It’s transparent in this letter,' said Henry, a professor emeritus of biochemistry at the Riverside campus. 'They are running businesses. But there are those of us that don’t feel this is what the university should be.'

'This is absolutely a manifestation of that clash between the people who see UC as their business … and the people who see UC’s mission as teaching, and research and service to the state. That’s a dual personality that the university always has to live with.'

Five of the university leaders demanding higher pensions for themselves have responsibilities as directors of corporations that may conflict with their academic institutions' missions, while these corporate positions ought to insulate them from financial concerns about their retirement. This corroborates Prof Henry's notion that they see themselves as businesspeople whose role is separate from, and not necessarily supportive of the university mission.

I disagree, however, with Prof Henry's implication that the University has to live with such a split among its leadership. People who lead academic institutions have a primary responsibility to support the academic mission. Their goals should not be to maximize profits, much less to enrich themselves. Letting academia, and academic medicine be lead by leaders out to make money and line their own pockets will lead to just that, but hardly better teaching, research, and patient care.