Implementation and Enactment of the Guidelines

AcademyHealth is a professional organization lacking formal enforcement authority. At best, it can use its suasion to identify ethical practices that act as moral standards for others to enact. Nevertheless, AcademyHealth’s guidelines can serve as a backdrop against which individuals and institutions can evaluate their own behavior and educate their trainees, as well as a resource when managing difficult ethical situations. The Committee believes that a set of ethical guidelines outlining accepted behavior will serve health services researchers well.

To implement the spirit of this policy, AcademyHealth urges the following substantive changes.

• Organizations entering into grant and contract agreements for research and analysis with sponsors should require that the agreement contains explicit statements allowing researchers to be free to analyze the data, draw their own conclusions, and disseminate the results. The agreement should specify the outcome measures, data sources, methods of analysis, and mode/timing of the release of results required by the sponsor and agreed to by the researcher; if not specified, these items must be at the sole discretion of the researcher. Contracts should also specify that all restrictive requirements necessitated by the sponsor may be publicly disclosed by the researcher. In addition, contracts should contain information regarding the amount of time that the sponsor has for review of the results prior to reporting; this time is preferably 2 months, but should not exceed 6 months except in extraordinary circumstances.

• Journals that publish health services research should adopt policies that require disclosure of sponsors’ involvement in the research, especially in identifying the objectives, measures, data sources, methods of analysis, and interpretation. These disclosures should accompany the reporting of the research results.
• AcademyHealth and other supporters of research should increase awareness of these guidelines in the field and among research sponsors, taking whatever actions are feasible collectively to encourage research sponsors to employ practices consistent with these guidelines.
• Researchers and policy analysts should adhere to these guidelines in the conduct of their research and whenever they are engaged in advocacy. They should clearly and consistently distinguish their researcher and advocacy roles when they might be confused by observers, disclose the sponsorship of their work, any personnel payments for research and advocacy work their have received, and any political, legal or other interests in their research.
• Institutions that train or sponsor training of health services researchers should include instruction in conflict of interest and these guidelines as part of that training.

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Continue to:

• Introduction
• AcademyHealth Ethical Guidelines Committee and Its Objectives
• Conflicts of Interest
  • What is a Conflict of Interest?
  • Conducting Research versus Using Research
• Distinctive Characteristics of Health Services Research
• Guiding Values
• Ethical Guidelines
  • Initiation of Research
  • Conducting Research
  • Reporting Research
• Analyzing a Potential Conflict of Interest
• Implementation and Enactment of the Guidelines
• Conclusion
• Appendix A – AcademyHealth Ethical Guidelines Committee
• Appendix B – Committee Action
• Appendix C – Conflict of Interest Resources