In the spring of 2008, The Abell Foundation asked The Institute on Medicine as a Profession (IMAP) at Columbia University to analyze clinical care conflict-of-interest (COI) policies at Baltimore’s three largest health-care networks. Accounting for a majority of the city’s hospitals and physicians, they are: University of Maryland Medical Center, Johns Hopkins Medicine, and MedStar Health. IMAP’s goal was to analyze the
policies’ strengths and weaknesses by comparing them to each other and to the best practices drawn from IMAP’s previous research on academic medical-center guidelines.