“I don’t want any yes-men around me. I want everybody to tell me the truth even if it costs them their jobs.” -- Samuel Goldwyn
Important article in the October edition of Southern California Physician, “The Devil in the (Academic) Details.”
Some verbatims:
Since they are not employed by a pharmaceutical company nor do they receive incentives from them, then they must be completely unbiased, right?
Not so fast.
“Of course more information is always better,” says Peter Pitts, President of the Center For Medicine in the Public Interest, a nonprofit, nonpartisan research and educational organization that seeks to advance the discussion and development of patient-centered health care. “But to argue that academic detailing is “pure” is absurd. The information being shared is only as good as those sharing.”
Pitts says that the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute—a research organization dedicated to the support and promotion of comparative clinical effectiveness research, which was created through the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act—plans to offer Continuing Medical Education Credits to physicians who meet with academic detailers. The practice is potentially dangerous if the academic detailers are acting in the interest of government’s push to drive down health care costs, for example by promoting generics over other new types of drugs.
The Real Bottom Line
Whether you are a fan of academic detailing or not, the bottom line is that federal and state governments are driving and funding the effort. And it is clear that they are tasked with reducing the cost of health care, even if it is not necessarily in the best interest of the patients.
If you get a visit by an academic detailer, keep in mind that they may not be any less biased than a pharmaceutical representative and they definitely do not have to follow the same rules.
The complete article can be found here.
