Editor's Corner

Let's put aside, for a moment, the no-pharma-freebies policy Henry Ford Health System (HFHS) has put into place, as interesting as it is as part of a larger movement in the industry. Yes, I do think that banning all promotional items and literature, down to the least of branded paper clips, is taking things too far. But like it or not, pharma swag bans are just what's happening today, so this move isn't a surprise.

No, what I find more interesting is the extraordinarily organized and resource-intensive effort HFHS has put into place to regulate its relationship with vendors. Now this is truly worthy of discussion. Creating vendor certification rules, establishing consensus on these rules, setting up a call center for appointment scheduling and verification and communicating the rules across the entire HFHS system must have been no small undertaking, nor a cheap one. So a few questions come up for me:

• Did HFHS do a formal analysis to see exactly what impact (say, in terms of hours lost or drug-prescribing decisions influenced) informal vendor drop-ins had on their operations?
• From what part of the HFHS system did the pressure come to take these steps? (In other medical systems, doctors have driven the anti-freebie campaigns, but who at HFHS was concerned enough about vendor relationships to drive this campaign?)
• Other than clogging the halls and handing out free "candy," are there specific vendor practices HFHS is trying to squeeze out of the system by establishing stringent vendor controls?

Basically, what I'm wondering is whether this was a carefully-structured management analysis of the system's operations, a politically-driven reaction to some irritant, or some combination of the two. And I'm wondering, either way, how they'll tell if what they're doing works. In my opinion, HFHS may lose a bit more than they gain in establishing such controls, as (sometimes annoyingly) informal vendor relationships do provide some benefits. But maybe I'm missing a key point here. Readers, what do you think? - Anne