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Organizations producing practice guidelines infrequently disclose financial relationships
Recent research in PLoS Medicine found that organizations that produced clinical practice guidelines rarely disclosed financial relationships with biomedical companies, despite these relationship being common.
“Financial relationships between organizations that produce clinical practice guidelines and biomedical companies are vulnerable to conflicts of interest,” Henry T. Stelfox, BMSc, MD, PhD, assistant professor of the departments of critical care medicine, medicine and community health sciences at the University of Calgary, and colleagues wrote. “We sought to determine whether organizations that produce clinical practice guidelines have financial relationships with biomedical companies and whether there are associations between organizations’ conflict of interest policies and recommendations and disclosures provided in guidelines.”
The researchers administered surveys to 95 national and international medical organizations that produced and published 290 clinical practice guidelines during 2012. Sixty-five of these groups completed the survey. The researchers also conducted website review for all 95 organizations and reviewed all 290 practice guidelines for conflict of interest information.
Study results showed 6% of all guidelines provided disclosures for direct funding from biomedical companies, 40% provided disclosures for financial relationships between committee members and biomedical companies, and 1% disclosed financial relationships between the organizations and medical companies. According to the researchers, 63% of organization that published clinical practice guidelines reported receiving funding from biomedical companies.
The researcher also found that guidelines with the most comprehensive disclosure information policies included fewer positive recommendations (RR = 0.91; 95% CI, 0.86-0.95) and more negative recommendations for products produced by biomedical companies (RR = 1.32; 95% CI, 1.09-1.6).
“These relationships are important because they may influence, through guideline usage, the practice of large numbers of health care providers,” Stelfox and colleagues wrote. “We believe that to effectively manage conflicts of interest, organizations that produce clinical practice guidelines need to develop robust conflict of interest policies that include procedures for managing violations of the policy, make the policies publicly available, and disclose all financial relationships with biomedical companies.” – by David Costill
Disclosure: The researchers report no relevant financial disclosures.
