Conflict of Interest Policies at Canadian Universities and Medical Schools: Some Lessons from the AMSA PharmFree Scorecard
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Lancée en 2007, l'American Medical Students Association (AMSA) PharmFree Scorecard est un classement annuel des politiques de conflit d'intérêts (CI) de centres médicaux américains.Il se concentre sur les CI qui peuvent survenir lorsque la formation médicale est influencée par les relations université-industrie, en particulier ceux concernant l'industrie pharmaceutique et les dispositifs médicaux.Le PharmFree Scorecard s'est montré influent dans l'initiation de modification des politiques concernant la gestion des CI dans les institutions médicales américaines.Il fournit donc un point de départ utile pour une réflexion sur la manière et les raisons pour lesquelles les établissements d'enseignement médicaux dans d'autres pays -et pour nos fins, le Canada -devraient accorder plus d'attention à l'identification et à la gestion appropriée des CI.La méthodologie de la PharmFree Scorecard consiste à examiner la diversité des facteurs et des intérêts qui pourraient influencer l'enseignement médical, il s'agit donc d'une approche intéressante pour l'analyse des politiques de CI des écoles de médecine.Pour évaluer son utilité et son applicabilité à l'extérieur des États-Unis, nous avons décidé d'appliquer le PharmFree Scorecard aux politiques de CI des 16 universités canadiennes accueillent les écoles de médecine.Dans l'ensemble, les institutions canadiennes se classent très mal, particulièrement en ce qui concerne la disponibilité d'outils d'éducation et de formation concernant l'identification et la gestion de CI pour le personnel, les étudiants et les professeurs.Cependant, les différences entre les contextes d'enseignement médical aux États-Unis et au Canada (en ce qui concerne la gouvernance et le financement des universités par exemple) limitent, dans une certaine mesure, l'applicabilité directe du classement AMSA.Même si elles peuvent et doivent aller plus loin en élaborant leurs propres politiques de CI et procédures, les écoles de médecine canadiennes -et leurs universités d'accueil -ont néanmoins beaucoup à apprendre des indications fournies par le classement AMSA PharmFree Scorecard.Launched in 2007, the American Medical Students Association (AMSA) PharmFree Scorecard is an annual ranking of conflict of interest (COI) policies at American medical centres; it focuses on COIs that may occur when medical education seems likely to be influenced by university-industry relationships, especially those with the pharmaceutical and medical device industries.The PharmFree Scorecard has proven influential in stimulating changes in policy regarding the management of COI at American medical institutions, thus it provides a useful jumping off point for reflection on how and why medical education institutions in other countries -and for our purposes, Canada -should pay more attention to the appropriate identification and management of COI.The PharmFree Scorecard methodology examines a diversity of factors and interests that could influence medical education; as such, it is an interesting approach to analysing the COI policies of medical schools.To test its utility or applicability outside the US, we decided to apply the PharmFree Scorecard to the COI policies of the 16 Canadian universities hosting medical schools.Overall, Canadian institutions rank very poorly, especially in ensuring that education and training tools are provided to staff, students and faculty members to enable the identification and management of COI.However, differences between the US and Canadian medical education contexts, e.g., with regards to the governance and funding of universities, limit to some extent the direct applicability of the AMSA ranking.Canadian medical schools -and their host universities -nonetheless have much to learn from insights provided by the AMSA PharmFree Scorecard ranking, although they can and should go further in developing their own COI policies and procedures.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.045 | 0.099 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.010 | 0.023 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.019 | 0.020 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.026 | 0.012 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.007 | 0.012 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".