A team of Canadian researchers has found that financial relationships between biomedical companies and organizations that draw up clinical practice guidelines are common and not always disclosed.
As researchers led by the University of Calgary's Henry Stelfox report in PLOS Medicine this week, they conducted a cross-sectional survey and review of 95 national or international medical organizations that developed 290 clinical practice guidelines published on the National Guideline Clearinghouse website in 2012.
Some 63 percent of the organizations that developed clinical practice guidelines said they'd received funds from a biomedical company in response to the survey. Some 65 percent of the guidelines included a disclosure statement divulging direct funding sources for producing the guidelines and 51 percent of guidelines had disclosure statements that included the financial relationships of guideline committee members. But only 1 percent of guidelines had disclosure statements that included the financial relationships of the organizations producing the guidelines.
"These relationships are important because they may influence, through guideline usage, the practice of large numbers of healthcare providers," Stelfox and his colleagues write. "We believe that to effectively manage conflicts of interest, organizations that produce clinical practice guidelines need to develop robust conflict of interest policies that include procedures for managing violations of the policy, make the policies publicly available, and disclose all financial relationships with biomedical companies."