Not long back, I departed a pharma-sponsored research project. I based my decision to leave in something I occasioned over a decade ago. I thought it was time to share the episode and the lessons learned given the attention being paid to physician conflict of interest nowadays (as well as the annual Open Payments review and dispute period approaching).
When I finished training, very few docs practiced hospital medicine—or even knew what the term hospitalist meant. Several forward-thinking medical centers hitched their wagons to the hospitalist model, as did some astute information technology and staffing companies.
However, few healthcare players embraced the hospitalist movement in a serious fashion like the pharmaceutical industry. They realized hospitalists prescribed a narrow band of products, in big lots, within a centralized location. The higher ups in the pharma sector saw the benefits in directing reps our way.