Health Sciences | News

UCSF Automates Conflict of Interest Management

• By Leila Meyer
• 09/12/12

The University of California, San Francisco, which is dedicated exclusively to the health sciences, will automate its conflict of interest disclosure process to comply with new National Institute of Health (NIH) COI disclosure regulations. The university has selected COI-Smart from Health Care Compliance Strategies (HCCS) to track, manage, and report on COI disclosures for its 5,000 faculty members, post-docs, and fellows.

The university needed a system that could meet the NIH's requirements for public health service (PHS) grants and contracts, according to information released by HCCS, and COI-Smart fit the bill with its quick-start option to help organizations ensure they are in compliance with the NIH COI regulations for PHS funded research.

"With a large number of users involved in many research projects, it was imperative to have a flexible system that could be implemented quickly and would make the disclosure process straightforward and easy for our research investigators and administrators alike," said Eric Mah, senior director of research for UCSF, in a prepared statement.

With COI-Smart, UCSF will also be able to eliminate paper-based COI disclosure management and have the option of conducting annual COI surveys, as well as transactional or "elective" questionnaires. The university can also use COI-Smart to create branching questionnaires, automatically assign reviewers, develop COI management plans, and view a graphical representation of the status of the COI disclosure process through administrative dashboards.

The University of California, San Francisco offers programs in medicine, nursing, dentistry, and pharmacy. It serves approximately 3,000 students, 1,600 residents (physicians, dentists, and pharmacists in training), and 1,000 postdoctoral scholars and employs 2,400 faculty members.

Further information about COI-Smart is available on the HCCS site.