logo
    • Magazine
    • Membership
    • Donate
  • Racial Justice
  • Economic Justice
    • Collections
  • Climate Justice
  • Health Justice
  • Leadership
  • CONTENT TYPES
  • Subscribe
  • Webinars
    • Upcoming Webinars
    • Complimentary Webinars
    • Premium On-Demand Webinars
  • Membership
  • Submissions

Memorial Sloan Kettering Still Trying to Save Face on Conflicts of Interest

Ruth McCambridge
April 5, 2019
Share
Tweet
Share
Email
Print
“Nothing to See Here,” Ciro Duran

April 4, 2019; New York Times

Yesterday, ProPublica and the New York Times published the latest in their investigation into the governance problems at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, citing a just-completed review by law firm Debevoise & Plimpton. The review’s findings were damning, calling out a laissez-faire culture that extended from the boardroom out into the practices among leading doctors and administrators.

It concluded that officials frequently violated or skirted their own policies; that hospital leaders’ ties to companies were likely considered on an ad hoc basis rather than through rigorous vetting; and that researchers were often unaware that some senior executives had financial stakes in the outcomes of their studies.

Reports have described the environment as one in which venture capitalists spend freely, vying for control of the latest advances in cancer treatment, and where doctors and administrators were in effect cutting special deals with them. In such a context, of course, Sloan Kettering had a responsibility to be unstinting in its oversight of relationships that might lessen the objectivity of the hospital’s work and mitigate its ethical responsibilities to put the interests of its patients first.

The report itself is being held back but was summarized by Mark P. Goodman, cochair of the law firm’s commercial litigation group, who cited “a number of instances of serious noncompliance with MSK’s conflict-of-interest policies.”

The conflicts and some profit-making deals—which were not specified at the meeting—did not occur through intentional misconduct, Mr. Goodman said. Rather, the review exposed inadequate oversight and a lack of established protocols for examining whether employees’ and executives’ affiliations with corporations could result in biased results that favored a company’s products.

Goodman said the review did not find that the ethical shortcomings caused any harm either to patients or research. But this position may strain credulity in the face of some of the links already found. As just one example among many top doctors, administrators, and board members at Memorial Sloan Kettering, the institution’s chief medical officer, Dr. José Baselga, resigned in September after it was determined that he had not disclosed his receipt of millions of dollars from drug and healthcare companies in return for articles in medical journals. Other resignations ensued, but it took until January for Memorial Sloan Kettering to bar its top executives from serving on the corporate boards of drug and healthcare companies and to limit the ways in which personnel could try to make an extra buck on the 23,500 cancer patients served at the hospital each year.

Sign up for our free newsletters

Subscribe to NPQ's newsletters to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

By signing up, you agree to our privacy policy and terms of use, and to receive messages from NPQ and our partners.

Nevertheless, Goodman maintains there were no findings of any “a conscious decision to engage in misconduct.”

“Although we did not identify evidence of breaches of fiduciary duty, we did find that processes and controls for the review and management of senior executive and board-level conflicts were deficient and resulted in instances of noncompliance with MSK policies,” Goodman said. Specifically, plans to manage executive conflicts of interest, a requirement at the hospital, “were not implemented because it was felt to be unnecessary or because there was a failure to realize that a management plan was needed.”

In other words, the public is to believe that these were just a bunch of unsophisticated good-hearted folk who wandered into a danger zone by mistake.

Mr. Goodman also said that hospital leaders’ corporate ties were handled differently from other employees. Beginning in 2014, senior executives were no longer required to vet financial relationships with a conflict-of-interest advisory committee because the hospital felt the committee should not be asked to make decisions about executives to whom it reported. While Mr. Goodman said that rationale made sense, the general counsel’s office—tasked with overseeing the leaders’ conflicts—did not put in place formal procedures to examine potential problems.

“As a result,” Mr. Goodman said, “conflicts were allowed to persist without formal firewalls in place.”

The institution would like us all to pay attention to its new and improved conflict-of-interest policies, but perhaps it is not yet time. We would suggest that an institution now seen as having neatly hidden some pretty troubling relationships worth many millions of dollars to organizational stewards behind a curtain for so many years should, were it completely in a reform mindset, release reports rather than merely characterizing them to the public. That is what atonement and reconciliation requires.—Ruth McCambridge

Share
Tweet
Share
Email
Print
About the author
Ruth McCambridge

Ruth is Editor Emerita of the Nonprofit Quarterly. Her background includes forty-five years of experience in nonprofits, primarily in organizations that mix grassroots community work with policy change. Beginning in the mid-1980s, Ruth spent a decade at the Boston Foundation, developing and implementing capacity building programs and advocating for grantmaking attention to constituent involvement.

More about: conflicts of interestBoard GovernanceNonprofit News

Become a member

Support independent journalism and knowledge creation for civil society. Become a member of Nonprofit Quarterly.

Members receive unlimited access to our archived and upcoming digital content. NPQ is the leading journal in the nonprofit sector written by social change experts. Gain access to our exclusive library of online courses led by thought leaders and educators providing contextualized information to help nonprofit practitioners make sense of changing conditions and improve infra-structure in their organizations.

Join Today
logo logo logo logo logo
See comments

Spring-2023-sidebar-subscribe
You might also like
Are Your Organization and Its Board “Access Able”?
Katherine Schneider
Navigating Succession: Four Exiting CEO Mindsets
Aparna Anand Joshi, Donald C. Hambrick and Jiyeon Kang
Survey Finds Vast Shortfall in Diversity Efforts of Leading Boston Nonprofits
Steve Dubb
Network Governance as an Empowerment Tool
Blythe Butler and Sami Berger
Otto Bremer’s 3 Paid Trustees Face State Charges of Violating Their Trustee Role
Marian Conway
“Diversify Your Board or Else!” Nonprofits Need a Standard, Too
Martin Levine

NPQ Webinars

April 27th, 2 pm ET

Liberatory Decision-Making

How to Facilitate and Engage in Healthy Decision-making Processes

Register Now
You might also like
AOC’s “Tax the Rich” Dress Dazzles Met Gala, while...
Anastasia Reesa Tomkin
Foundation Giving Numbers for 2020 Show 15 Percent Increase
Steve Dubb
Strike MoMA Imagines Art Museums without Billionaires
Tessa Crisman

Like what you see?

Subscribe to the NPQ newsletter to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

See our newsletters

By signing up, you agree to our privacy policy and terms of use, and to receive messages from NPQ and our partners.

NPQ-Spring-2023-cover

Independent & in your mailbox.

Subscribe today and get a full year of NPQ for just $59.

subscribe
  • About
  • Contact
  • Advertise
  • Copyright
  • Careers

We are using cookies to give you the best experience on our website.

 

Non Profit News | Nonprofit Quarterly
Powered by  GDPR Cookie Compliance
Privacy Overview

This website uses cookies so that we can provide you with the best user experience possible. Cookie information is stored in your browser and performs functions such as recognising you when you return to our website and helping our team to understand which sections of the website you find most interesting and useful.

Strictly Necessary Cookies

Strictly Necessary Cookie should be enabled at all times so that we can save your preferences for cookie settings.

If you disable this cookie, we will not be able to save your preferences. This means that every time you visit this website you will need to enable or disable cookies again.