Disclosures of Conflicts of Interest

In this episode, our hosts Dr. Ally Behati and Dr. Michael Barraza interview Dr. Mina Makary about his recent article with the Applied Ethics in IR Working Group about physician conflicts of interest and disclosures in image-guided research publications.

Dr. Makary walks us through the study design. The analysis over one year of JVIR articles had two goals. Firstly, the study aimed to assess the prevalence of disclosures in US-based IR research. Additionally, the researchers inspected the level of agreement between disclosed financial relationships and open payment data for top-cited image-guided procedure research. Since 2013, the open payment data has been available on the CMS Open Payment database.

Key results showed that disclosures were reported in 29% of JVIR publications in 2019. When comparing reported versus actual financial relationships, it was found that 97% of researchers failed to disclose at least one active financial relationship. Furthermore, there was an average of $58k in undisclosed payments for each publication.

Finally, we discuss important takeaways from this study. While industry support is a necessary driver of IR device innovation and practice building, it can influence research agendas. Dr. Makary advises all IRs to be cognizant of the underreporting of financial relationships and how this could make authors implicitly or explicitly biased in their research. He advocates for the construction of an open global registry that automatically links payment information to research disclosures.