Ranking Medical Schools
The American Medical Student Association has a Scorecard ranking of American Medical School COI policies (AMSA PharmaFree), with an explicit focus on the involvement of the pharmaceutical sector. See the following story for a detailed discussion of this ranking: Medical Students, Pew Find Improvement in Medical School Pharmaceutical Conflict-of-Interest Policies, But Many Lag
Over one-fifth of U.S. medical schools improved their conflict-of-interest rules in the past year, yet dozens of others lag behind according to the 2009 American Medical Student Association (AMSA) PharmFree Scorecard, released today. The Scorecard, developed by AMSA and the Pew Prescription Project, finds that 45 of 149 medical schools now receive a grade of A or B for their policies governing pharmaceutical industry interaction with medical school faculty and students, compared with only 29 last year. However, for the second year, dozens of schools received grades of D or F and remain far behind the national leaders…
This type of detailed analysis and ranking goes a long way to helping map out the terrain of COI policies in institutions. It also provides the data necessary for researchers and policy makers to think about how to develop better governance mechanism. My one critique would be that in focusing almost exclusively on “Big Pharma” and financial relations with medical schools, critics and policy makers may ignore or downplay other non-financial interests, or relations with other actors that can still contribute to important COI.