At a time when medical schools are facing unprecedented scrutiny for potential conflicts of interest, a number of their deans have either failed to disclose or underreported the income they received for serving on health-industry corporate boards, according to a report to be presented next month at a national faculty meeting.
A shortened version of the report, “Failure by Deans of Academic Medical Centers to Disclose Outside Income,” appeared in the March 28 issue of the Archives of Internal Medicine. Its findings will be presented at the annual meeting of the American Association of University Professors, in June, in Washington.
“Deans are supposed to be exemplars,” said the report’s lead author, M. Felix Freshwater, a Miami physician and voluntary professor of surgery at the University of Miami’s School of Medicine.
The authors compiled a list of all medical-school deans in the United States as of June 2009 and compared the income the deans reported on their universities’ Web sites with what the companies reported to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
They found that seven of the 161 deans served as directors of a total of 10 health-industry companies. The compensation those seven deans earned for their board service ranged from $11,250 to $640,038, with a median of $217,454.
Although the names of the deans were not listed, a figure accompanying the article listed the companies involved, and a glance at the companies’ Web sites revealed which medical deans served on them.
One medical dean—identifiable as Edward D. Miller of the Johns Hopkins University—served on four company boards. Only two of the companies, both financial-services firms, were listed. The two boards of health-care companies the dean served on were not.
A Johns Hopkins spokesman said that faculty members and administrators were not required to report relationships with outside industries on any Web sites, and that Dr. Miller’s outside activities had been approved by the medical school’s Committee on Outside Interests.
Unlisted Numbers
Four of the deans’ Web pages made no mention at all of their board service. And some mentions were incomplete or inaccurate, according to the authors.
William L. Roper, dean of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s School of Medicine, discloses on his university’s Web site that he serves on the boards of DaVita Inc., a company that provides treatment for people with chronic kidney disease, and Medco Health Solutions Inc., a pharmaceutical company. However, the compensation he received in 2009—$386,439 from DaVita and $253,559 from Medco—is not listed.
David M. Parker, associate vice chancellor and deputy general counsel at Chapel Hill, said in an e-mail that the medical school had recently amended its disclosure policies to include income derived from such boards. “Once that policy is fully operational, the amount of Dr. Roper’s projected annual income from these activities will be made publicly available by the university to the extent required by the policy,” he said.
Meanwhile, according to the report, Arthur H. Rubenstein, dean of the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Medicine, earned $237,559 from his service on the board of the Laboratory Corporation of America but reported earning only $104,000.
In an e-mail, Susan E. Phillips, senior vice president and chief of staff at the medical school, said Penn employees did not publicly report stock or stock options as compensation for outside activities, and that’s why the reported figure seemed low.
She said the school had reworded the introduction to its public Web site to make that clear. The school “is considering having additional information, such as equity and royalty income from intellectual property, publicly available in future reports,” she said.
The University of Miami’s Web site underreported the income received by its medical dean, Pascal J. Goldschmidt, for two outside directorships by 39 percent and 82 percent, according to the report. The dean said his reported income did not include stock options that he held but had not exercised.
In an e-mail, the dean said that the medical school’s Web list, set up at his request, did not initially allow for reporting unexercised share options: “I asked that we include the opportunity to report this form of compensation, and as soon as it became possible, I completed my report.” He added that an independent review of the reporting last year showed “higher than 95-percent accuracy.”
Still, the report on deans recommended that medical schools have a publicly accessible Web site that discloses faculty compensation for outside activities.
It also said faculty members should verify the reported data by comparing the figures with the tax forms they receive from the company.
Conflict-of-interest provisions in the federal health-care overhaul enacted last year also called for the development of a searchable public Web site listing payments physicians receive from drug and medical-device makers.
