A task force representing the nation’s 125 medical colleges has recommended a ban on gifts and free meals for students and faculty and stricter regulations of industry visits on campus. But the Association of American Medical Colleges, whose executive council will consider the proposal in mid-June, stopped short of calling for prohibiting faculty members from consulting or speaking on behalf of drug and device companies, or for eliminating industry’s role in financing continuing medical education (CME).

“Clear and well-though-out guidelines will optimize the benefits inherent in the relationship between academic medicine and industry and minimize the risks,” the report said.

The 30-member task force was chaired by Roy Vagelos, former chairman of Merck, and included the CEOs of Pfizer, Medtronic, Amgen and Eli Lilly. The latter two dissented from the report’s recommendations “strongly discouraging” participation in speakers’ bureaus. The report closely followed a proposal made two years ago by Columbia University’s Institute on Medicine as a Profession with one exception. That report called for academic physicians to abandon participation in industry speakers’ bureaus, which it called “an extension of manufacturers’ marketing apparatus.”

Besides banning gifts, the guidelines called for centralized management of free drug samples or, where that is not possible, some alternative that does “not carry the risks to professionalism with which current practices are associated.” Drug and device salesperson visits with individual physicians should be restricted to non-patient areas and by appointment or invitation only.

On speaking and consulting, the report suggested “to the extent that academic medical centers choose to allow participation of their faculty and staff in industry-sponsored, FDA-regulated programs, they should develop standards that define appropriate and acceptable involvement,” which was defined as full transparency and payment “at fair market value.”

Rather than eliminating industry’s role in financing CME, which now accounts for more than half of the $2 billion industry, the AAMC task force recommended that the money be deposited in a centralized fund. It also recommended establishing school-level audit committees to monitor CME activities to ensure they follow conflict-of-interest guidelines established by the Accreditation Council for Continuing Medical Education. At an Institute of Medicine hearing in March, the Center for Science in the Public Interest urged organized medicine to encourage physicians to eliminate the middleman and pay directly for their own continuing education since patients and consumers already paid indirectly for CME through higher drug and device prices.

The version of this story originally appeared in Integrity in Science Watch, a publication of the Center for Science in the Public Interest.