Stanford School of Medicine announced Tuesday that it would place severe limitations on industry funding of its continuing medical education (CME) classes. Drug and device companies will no longer be allowed to fund specific courses, but will instead be asked to donate to a pool that will be used for all classes.

Stanford is now part of a very small group of medical schools that have restricted companies to “pool funding” for medical education. The New York Times reported that five other schools have taken a similar approach, but Stanford officials suggested that the group is even smaller.

The new policy is the latest move by the medical school to mitigate conflicts of interest.

“The decision about CME is really part of a series of policy decisions on the broad topic of conflict of interest that have been ongoing since 2004-2005,” said Medical School Dean Philip Pizzo in an email to The Weekly. “We began with our decision to ban gifts from industry in 2006. This was followed by other revisions in our conflict of interest policies for clinical practice.”

Last year, Pizzo appointed a task force to look into CME funding, chaired by Dr. Harry Greenberg, senior associate dean for research.

“There were lots of concerns appearing at the same time — Congress and various other groups had expressed concern,” Greenberg said. “We thought it would be reasonable for Stanford to have a committee and evaluate the story for industry support for CME at Stanford, and then to serve that up to the dean, with our options.”

Concerns about industry funding were indeed brewing in the public: Sen. Charles Grassley (R-IA) published a report in April 2007 detailing how companies sponsored CME courses to increase sales of medical products.

But Pizzo insisted that this week’s decision is the culmination of a long, thoughtful evaluation of conflicts of interest, and not a reaction to recent concerns.

“The decision to develop the new policies is in response to the options developed by the CME Task Force,” Pizzo said. “So this has really been a continuing and evolving assessment about industry relations and not a response to some new or precipitous event.”

Pizzo said that it is his belief that the new policy will improve continuing medical education at Stanford.

“I do not think that the quality of CME will be harmed,” Pizzo said, “but I do believe that the integrity of our educational programs and their freedom from any bias will be better achieved with these new policies.”

The new policy is, in fact, just a part of a host of measures that Stanford is planning to improve its CME courses.

“Current CME is traditionally lecture-based — what’s the newest and greatest, as opposed to how do we improve the health of this group of patients,” Greenberg said. “I think Rob [Jackler, associate dean for CME] has plans that we will shift content, irrespective of funding, to better education of improving outcomes and quality, and less emphasis on medical facts.”

Still, the threat of losing funding due to the new policies has a few officials worried about CME’s future.

“Many of the clinical chairs were very concerned about that [losing funding], and I imagine they remain concerned,” Greenberg said. “Most people would say that it’s a likelihood that funding would go down.”

But Pizzo maintained that the goal of preventing conflicts of interest is more valuable than the funding dollars that the new policy may lose.

“We fully recognize that funding will decline, but I do not believe that the concern about funding should cause us to compromise on the value of the programs we seek to provide,” Pizzo said. “They need to be based on the best science and strongest evidence, and not on whether or not there will be funding to support them.”