Our Guiding Principles
Collaboration between doctors and the medical device industry must be based on solid, ethical principles to avoid the potential for conflicts of interest. These conflicts, both real and perceived, can affect patient and stakeholder confidence in clinicians, products, companies – and the entire medical device industry.
Medtronic has been an industry leader in enhancing confidence in physician collaborations and protecting patient’s interests. In 2010, we reviewed and strengthened all internal policies and procedures around compensation and collaboration with U.S. physicians to meet our goal:
To sustain and enhance medical innovation through principled collaboration.
Through this effort, we developed guiding principles and standards to preserve physician collaboration for the benefit of patients, while minimizing actual or perceived conflicts of interest.
Guiding Principles
- Preserve the integrity of physician-patient relationships.
- Remain transparent about compensation and policies.
Standards
Needs-Based Collaboration
Medtronic adopted a company-wide process to plan for Health Care Provider (HCP) and Health Care Organization (HCO) consulting service agreements. This process includes enhanced documentation and analysis regarding the business need for services and the selection of a particular HCP/HCO to perform those needed services.
The Needs Assessment process seeks to ensure that collaboration with HCPs/HCOs is based on legitimate business need, is limited in scope, and payment is based on principles of fair market value compensation.
The Needs Assessment process examines key aspects of each HCP/HCO engagement, including:
- The services we need from HCPs/HCOs and the reasons they cannot be performed without the involvement of HCPs/HCOs.
- The bona fide need for the service.
- The necessary HCP/HCO qualifications for the services we seek.
The level of management review and executive oversight of requests for services correlates with the anticipated scope and level of services being requested.