Many people don’t know that the human eye has a blind spot in its field of vision. There is a part of the world that we are literally blind to. The problem is, sometimes our blind spots shield us from things that really shouldn’t be ignored. Sometimes our blind spots keep our lives bright and shiny.
– Meredith Grey, character from ABC TV Series Grey’s Anatomy
It’s safe to say that genetic counselors are not in it for the money. I prefer to believe that our practice is guided by what we perceive to be our patients’ best clinical and psychosocial interests, with no concern for fiscal gain for ourselves. But however bright and shiny we may be, we are only human and subject to the same economic pressures, character flaws, and temptations as everybody else. I am not claiming that there is wide scale greed and corruption in the profession. What worries me more is that our blind spot can prevent us from detecting or admitting the possibility of a conflict of interest.
This topic has not been openly discussed among genetic counselors, so it’s about time the subject was broached. I suspect this discussion will evoke discomfort, defensiveness, and not a little denial. Financial conflicts of interest might arise in many areas of genetic counseling but I will explore just three: when genetic counselors work for laboratories as expert advisors on genetic testing, when we need to justify our clinical positions to hospital administrators, and at our annual education conference.
Genetic counselors who work in medical centers are just as liable to conflicts of interest as their laboratory counterparts. In these tough economic times, we are being called upon to justify our jobs to administrators who face dwindling budgets and might have less of an appreciation for clinical and psychosocial issues. In response, we might look to increase our patient volumes, and one way to do that is to expand the indications for referral to genetic counseling beyond what might be considered “medically necessary.” You might then tell your boss that broadened guidelines will increase downstream revenue through more extensive screening and increased rates of prophylactic surgery. Surely we are not talking our patients into salpingo-oophorectomies or breast MRIs to enrich the hospital’s coffers or to secure our jobs, but that is the message we are communicating to hospital administration (for the moment, ignoring the fact that we have little data to prove that assertion).
Or think about fetal diagnostic testing through maternal serum, which will presumably reduce the need for amniocentesis and CVS. Even if maternal serum testing proves to be not quite diagnostic and still require invasive testing for verification, First Positive rates will be much lower than with traditional serum/ultrasound screening. This in turn might lower departmental revenue by reducing the number of counseling referrals, invasive procedures, and karyotypes. Just how will those economic considerations affect our job security, how we evaluate these new tests, how we present them to our patients, and how we integrate them into our clinics?
The National Society of Genetic Counselors (NSGC), our collective face that we present to the public, has expanded its financial relationship with private laboratories. For example, in 2011, about 25% of the revenue from the Annual Education Conference came from corporate exhibitors and sponsors (contributing ~$216,000 of the total conference revenue of ~$820,000). Our professional relationships with labs are critical on many levels. But accepting money from them tacitly – if not officially – condones their services. NSGC would probably not accept certain labs as exhibitors or sponsors if those labs offered questionable services, like using genetic testing to find the perfect mate or to improve your sex life through nutrigenomics. Excluding some labs lends a certain amount of legitimacy to those labs from whom we do accept funds.
And let’s not forget those breakfasts and evening debaucheries that some private labs sponsor at every Annual Education Conference, or those exhibitor booths where we fill our corporate-logo imprinted conference tote bags with giveaway geegaws and doodads (“Oh, I’m just bringing these home for my kids. I am certainly not going to use this lab just because they gave me a glow in the dark double helix pen and a piece of chocolate. Even if it is a Dove dark chocolate.”).
You are deluding yourself if you think these drinks and trifles do not subtly affect your selection of a lab to run your tests. Just about every research study on this topic has concluded that those not-so-freebies do influence healthcare providers. Besides, if those giveaways didn’t help a business’s bottom line, do you think they would waste money giving them away? And when we go home and take those tote bags to the grocery like responsible Green Citizens, we become walking billboards that announce to the world that NSGC and Lab X are awfully cozy with each other.
I am not saying that genetic counselors should be unconcerned about their institutions’ bottom lines, or that the NSGC should abandon relationships with corporate sponsors. I have no idea of the magnitude of the problem because it has not been systematically studied. It is almost impossible to study it ourselves; those of us in the middle of are likely to have a hard time seeing it. Somebody outside of our profession needs to study this.
What the profession can do for itself is to clearly define financial conflicts of interest and develop guidelines to help genetic counselors navigate the treacherous waters of the Great Sea of Conflicts of Interest.
Am I being overly worried? Are there other aspects of genetic counseling that are vulnerable to these concerns? Share your thoughts and comments and air out this dusty old closet that we have avoided opening.
Our institution banned, as of two years ago, drug companies from providing food and “do-dads’ to us. Interestingly, this change was brought about because of complaints by medical students and residents who were concerned about undue influence, not by long time staff and faculty who had enjoyed these perks for years. Point well taken, Bob.
But we did have to increase our budget for pens and sticky notes…
Well thought and spoken Bob; I believe that you have articulated concerns that have voiced in many a private conversation in which I’ve participated or overheard.
Working for a government entity entails multiple annual trainings on many possible types of conflicts of interest and other ethical dilemmas as well as education about the many rules that cover our behavior when we are in our professional roles. While some of the regulations can border on the absurd, the emphasis remains on being cautious about perceived as well as tangible conflicts. In our rush to grow our organization and it’s influence, NSGC would do well to protect its reputation from internal as well as external tarnish. It seems to me that the solutions are multiple – first, increasing awareness among all members by having conversations such as Bob is initiating. Next, by having clear and widely distributed BoD and funding policies to avoid egregious violations. Additionally, we could add to NSGC some structural means of addressing conflicts of interest – e.g., an ethics committee extension. Finally, those counselors who work for laboratories or other commercial entities could entreat those companies to articulate and enforce policies by which they avoid putting their employees in situations of potential conflicts of interest.
We now have an opportunity to protect and enhance the decades of good reputation that NSGC has enjoyed. Let’s not squander our ethical capital for short-sighted gains. Thanks, June
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Thank you for finally saying what should be apparent by both the marketing efforts and the embrace of cffDNA testing by the medical profession. At last week’s International Society for Prenatal Diagnosis conference, every tote bag featured MaterniT21 by Sequenom; Sequenom hosted Monday’s opening reception, with every cocktail napkin having on it “MaterniT21. Clear. Convenient. Compelling.”; the brochure featured prominent ads from Sequenom’s compeitors, with every lab being well represented in the exhibit hall; and, several platform presentations featured the various cffDNA labs representatives explaining why their testing technology was not only as reliable, if not more so, as compared to the other cffDNA labs, but certainly distinct, from an intellectual property-perspective, from that of Sequenom’s methodology. In the post-conference survey, ISPD asked whether there was a corporate bias at the conference. I hope ISPD makes the survey results public to see if the attendees’ critical consciousness acknowledged the bias in favor of cffDNA testing.
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