My goal is to outline as many as possible and hopefully readers here will be able to fill in any that I might have missed. Because I am just one guy working in his spare time, it will not be an encyclopedic listing but it will be more comprehensive than you will find anywhere in the press or possibly the existing medical literature. It will also be more comprehensive than the typical political analysis that usually suggests that the only relevant conflicts of interest have to do with physicians making money or prescribing drugs in exchange for certain rewards. As you will see, these may be some of the least important conflicts of interest.
A good starting point is this diagram I made that looks at all of the important conflicts of interest that impinge on physicians. The diagram is not exhaustive. (click to enlarge)
Not all of the links are drawn and there are many smaller entities involved that have not been graphed. As you can see I have 13 major areas here that directly impact on physicians. It is important to keep in mind the main goal or interest is the practice of medicine. It flows from an ethical relationship with a physician. That relationship is defined as the physician acting toward the patient in a way that is only in the best interest of the patient in exchange for a professional fee. The modern relationship makes an important distinction in that the physician needs to be practicing scientific medicine. The American Psychiatric Association (APA) has a policy statement with some useful definitions. The APA defines the primary interest as "the highest level of evidence based practice, ethically based and scientifically valid research, and quality continuing education for the benefit of patients, the profession and society." They define secondary or personal interests such as personal, financial, or professional that: "may inhibit, distract, or unduly influence their (physicians) judgment or behavior in a manner that detracts from or subordinates the primary interest of patients and may be perceived by some as undermining public trust." Six examples of situations that may require vigilance to prevent conflict of interest issues are given and 5 of 6 can be seen as derivative of physician relationships with the pharmaceutical industry.
The Institute of Medicine (IOM) definition of conflict of interest is: "a set of circumstances that creates a risk that professional judgment or actions regarding a primary interest will be unduly influenced by a secondary interest." Note that the IOM makes no distinction about conflict of interest versus the appearance of conflict of interest. It turns out that the appearance of conflict of interest is the common standard that is used to indict the medical profession. The classic example that is typically given in the media is the influence of pharmaceutical representatives on physician prescribing behavior. The recent GSK disclosure confirms that that pharmaceutical representatives were paid based on the number of product prescriptions that the physicians they visited actually wrote. The idea is that promotional items of widely variable value (pens to pizza to golf outings to trips) and free samples led to increased prescriptions. Free samples provided to clinics was probably also a major factor and became a mainstay for many patients with limited or no mental health benefits. Typical press coverage suggests that the results of this type of conflict of interest are widespread and certain, but I would suggest that the great majority of physicians including many of those who were paid consultants by the pharmaceutical industry were not laboring under any conflict of interest.
Consider for a moment the conflicts of interest (COI) listed across the top of the diagram starting on the left with Managed Care COI. I have reviewed those conflicts of interest in great detail in previous posts. As an example consider the conflicts of interest in this post on how physician employees are managed by managed care companies. In all cases, there is a direct conflict of interest between physicians interest and the interest of the company and its managers. In every situation that I am aware of the physicians lose. That is typically viewed as a plus by the business managers running the company because it allows them to do whatever they want to do in terms of closing clinics and programs, firing physicians, firing support staff, coming up with business based performance metrics that are divorced from clinical reality, and denying care when they want to. When the conflict is framed as entitled doctors being managed for the first time in order to be fiscally responsible - apart from the obvious rhetoric the real impact on patients is lost. That has included the rationing of psychiatric services, the destruction of inpatient psychiatry services, the elimination of psychotherapy services, and the wholesale shifting of care for people with the severest forms of mental illness to deficient state operated services and correctional facilities.
Managed Care COI is almost always transacted by an army of intermediaries. There are so-called physician reviewers or utilization reviewers who look at records from a distance and second guess physicians actually treating the patient. They can say that they don't think a patient needs a particular service such as hospitalization and the patient is invariably discharged. These days many hospitals owned by managed care companies employ non-physician case managers who function the same as utilization reviewers and tell physicians when to discharge patients from the hospital. This review process represents what I consider to be the largest conflict of interest affecting the decision making process in medicine and it is the least transparent. You are not likely to hear about it until you or a family member are hospitalized and you are told that it is "time to go" based on an insurance company decision. You can see from the diagram that this COI is enmeshed with federal and state governments, think tanks, and some of the other managed care rationing tactics - Pharmaceutical Benefit Manager COI and Insurance Company COI. All of these bureaucracies can produce insurmountable obstacles to physicians trying to care for patients by denying diagnostic and treatment modalities and denying appropriate settings for care.
Staying on the Managed Care COI for a moment what do some of the other relationships imply? A full description of those relationships would require several books to explain. This all started about 30 years ago as a concerted anti-physician movement. Several political forces had an interest in making the argument that the reason for the high cost of American medicine was that physicians were greedy and they did too many procedures. The federal government set up a complex subjective billing and coding system to slow down physicians. It was a mechanism that could be used to investigate and prosecute anyone who seemed to be billing too much. They initially enforced these totally subjective rules with the FBI. At some point in the late 1990s, they allowed managed care organizations to internalize this process and control over physicians using this mechanism was handed off to managed care. Today it allows a managed care companies to look at the documentation of patient care, decide that the notes don't meet criteria for a certain bill, and retrospectively demand payment for reimbursed services based on the number of other people seen for that problem. The relationship between managed care companies and governments allows them to reimburse whatever they want for a service and demand back as much as they want. No other professionals have private industry and governments stacked against them in this manner. It is a motivating force for psychiatrists to not accept government backed insurance at a higher rate than other physicians.
Managed Care COI also means that it is practically impossible for a physician to appeal a decision by a managed care company. The appeal is to another doctor who is employed by that company. Any attempt to go outside of the company to a state insurance board is usually not productive. State insurance boards are after all generally run by political appointees who are insurance industry insiders. There are no neutral parties who are free of conflict of interest who can decide an appeal of an insurance company decision.
Practically all of the major entities represented on this chart operate in a similar manner to the managed care and insurance company conflicts of interest. They are business entities who have woven themselves deeply into the political system at all levels and they can generally do what they want to do in terms of running the US Health Care system. In most cases they treat physicians with impunity and tolerate professional groups only so far as they can co-opt some of their ideas and make it seem like they have an interest in quality care. They have also used their influence to introduce cost-effectiveness rhetoric into places where it makes no sense. That is especially true for psychiatric services where many have simply been shut down because they were not "cost-effective" enough.
Some of the other entities on the diagram are more subtle. Journalistic COI has a few sources. Certainly journalists have no interest in patient care or treatment standards. They do have an interest in selling stories and in some cases books. They have an interest in influencing people. Many of the stories I have commented on this blog over the past year were clearly rhetorical. Many were also the product of ignorance. Psychiatry is the only field in medicine, where non-experts don't hesitate to put their opinion in the New York Times and the New York Times doesn't hesitate to print it. One of the most read posts on this blog in the past year was about a Washington Post article that I critiqued for many of these reasons.
Professional Organization COI is also an interesting one. Consider the APA represents roughly 40,000 psychiatrists but only about 40% are actual members. When the American Board of Medical Specialties decided that they would introduce a new and onerous procedure to certify physicians in an ongoing manner instead of for life, the APA clearly sided with the ABMS despite widespread dissatisfaction by the membership. The conflict of interest considerations here are considerable and heavily financial. There is no scientific evidence that the proposed ABMS recertification process is a valid approach. There is certainly no evidence that a less onerous approach that would be less stressful to physicians would not achieve the goal of ongoing professional education and public safety.
The next time you read a story in the press about wealthy physicians being paid off to prescribe unnecessary medications or to perform unnecessary surgeries, pull up the COI diagram and print it out. The truth is that physicians are caught in a web of conflict of interest. Those conflicts of interest are generally set up to ration services to patients; ration or deny reimbursement to physicians; maximize the profits of middlemen (MCOs, HMOs, PBMs, Insurance companies); make politicians, think tanks, journalists and critics look good; and distribute a large chunk of the health care dollar to people who are not involved in providing the services. The impact is the greatest by far in the area of psychiatric services but at some level it affects all of medicine. The impact on physicians is also significant. All of the pressures on physicians as a result of these conflicts of interest widen dissatisfaction with the field and increase burnout. Both of those factors can potentially impact physician availability and intellectual resources necessary for optimal performance. So if your physician looks burned out - he or she may well be. It is probably directly related to doing an additional 2 or 3 hours of work every day to satisfy the requirements of all of these extraneous conflicts of interest. Of course that is all generally unreimbursed time. How would most workers react to putting in a full day and then an additional 2 - 3 hours off the clock to satisfy the requirements of some outside company? It is like working for free for another company.
That is the real cost of conflict of interest and one of the reasons that health care premiums are essentially another tax on all Americans.
Happy New Year!
George Dawson, MD, DFAPA
Institute of Medicine (US) Committee on Conflict of Interest in Medical Research, Education, and Practice; Lo B, Field MJ, editors. Conflict of Interest in Medical Research, Education, and Practice. Washington (DC): National Academies Press (US); 2009. Available from: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK22942/
