BACKGROUND The proportion of medical doctors involved in research activities is declining. Undergraduate medical research programs are positively associated with medical students' research interest. Scientific pre-university programs (SPUPs) outside the medical domain are also positively associated with research interest, but have not been related to the shortage of clinician-scientists. This s...

During a presentation at the 2016 ASCO Annual Meeting in Chicago, Illinois, a bioethicist joked that financial conflict of interest (COI) disclosures were the great success of modern bioethics. I appreciated the irony; perhaps our focus on financial COI has overshadowed other competing interests at the intersection of academic medicine and clinical research. Nonfinancial COIs may be equally per...

Open Medicine 2010;4(3):e134 Financial conflicts of interest (fcoi) are of particular concern in the conduct of human subject research, whether they occur at the level of individual investigators or at the level of the institution.1 Institutional fCOI can occur when an institution that hosts the research, or a senior institutional official acting on behalf of the institution, has a financial in...

The management of financial conflict of interest (COI) in academic medicine has again been thrust in the spotlight, with some writers contending that current COI policies—largely a mandate to disclose conflicts, and, on rare occasion, recusal from academic opportunities or divestiture of the conflict—may perversely stifle biomedical innovation. Others have argued in opposition, noting that loss...

BACKGROUND A majority of academic medical centers (AMCs) have now adopted conflict of interest policies (COI) to address relationships with pharmaceutical and device industries that can increase the risk of bias in patient care, education and research. However, AMCs may have little information on the impact of their policies. This paper provides a new method, which is a free, publicly-available...

Dr. Leonard Kim is the chief medical physicist at the MD Anderson Cancer Center at Cooper in Camden, New Jersey. Prior to coming to Cooper, he worked at Rutgers University and William Beaumont Hospital. He holds a MS in radiological physics from Wayne State University as well as doctorate and undergraduate degrees from the University of Michigan and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dr...

Witness reports are a key building block for reputation systems in open multi-agent systems in which agents, that are owned by a variety of stakeholders, continuously enter and leave the system. However, in such open and dynamic environments, these reports can be inaccurate because of the differing views of the reporters. Moreover, due to the conflicting interests that stem from the multiple st...

Online museums could benefit from digital "lifelike" characters in order to guide users to virtual tours and to customize the tour information to users' interests. Digital characters have been explored in online museum web sites with different degrees of interaction and modes of communication. Such research, however, does not explore interactive "conversational" characters. The main interest of...

This paper discusses how a joint information system can be developed. The implementation was carried out in a project, doing final definitions and specifications, producing the information system and taking it into pilot use. The environment of the new collaborative information system is in the university world where student mobility is increasing. Student mobility means that students are enabl...

Specialized early intervention (SEI) approach to treatment of a First Episode of Psychosis (FEP) consists of two equally important components, namely, a phase specific treatment program and early case identification. In this article we report a brief update on our knowledge about both aspects of SEI services. We then provide a description of a prototypical SEI service within the Canadian contex...