Managing Conflicts of Interest in Education

In 2009, the Foundation focused on developing a plan to educate medical students, residents and physicians about how to identify and manage conflicts of interest in the educational domain. Our work in this area built off a seminal article in the Journal of the American Medical Association, entitled Professional Medical Associations and Their Relationships With Industry on managing conflicts of interest. The article was developed from an initiative co-sponsored with the Institute on Medicine as a Profession.

Activities around this work included the support for an Institute of Medicine Report on conflicts of interest in education, practice and research, and a new initiative to build a framework for a conflicts of interest curriculum for medical students, residents and practicing physicians. The American College of Physicians has also included it in its High-Value Care curriculum.