healthy4u: Virginia Commonwealth University

VCU President Rao's Previous Code of Silence

We recently <a href="http://hcrenewal.blogspot.com/2010/11/confidentiality-clause-or-oath-of.html">posted</a> about the code of silence imposed by Virginia Commonwealth University President Stephen Rao on his staff.  It turns out now that this was not his first exercise in imposing a code of silence. Before he was at Virginia Commonwealth University, Rao was President of Central Michigan University.  Central Michigan Life just <a href="http://www.cm-life.com/2010/12/03/rao-retracts-confidentiality-agreements-at-vcu-cmu-employees-not-in-same-circumstance-under-ross">reported</a>: <blockquote>While serving as CMU president, Rao required all office employees to sign a similar confidentiality agreement stating all names, places, dates or incidents that happened in his office were not to be shared with anyone or discussed outside the office. 'I understand that the information and all files, letters, projects, telephone calls and anything relating to the work performed in the President’s Office and in my capacity as an employee is highly confidential,' stated the agreement, which was obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request. 'I understand that it may not be discussed with anyone outside this office who does not have a need to know, which includes any other CMU employee, as well as my family members, friends, etc.' The CMU confidentiality agreement extended past any employee’s tenure at CMU, stating that the contract must not be broken past the term of employment. If an employee were to break the confidentiality agreement past employment, possible consequences included personal liability and potential lawsuits.</blockquote> Note that just as was the case in Virginia, this agreement placed employees at risk not only of losing their jobs, but of being sued were they to violate the agreement. By the way, while Central Michigan University does not include a medical school and academic medical center, as does VCU, it does have, and therefore the previous agreement affected the operations of multiple health related programs (see <a href="http://www.cmich.edu/Admissions/Academic_Programs/Health-related.htm">here</a>) including allied health, health administration, physical therapy, and psychology. As we wrote previously, such a code of silence subverts the university's central mission, and directly opposes the transparency I believe is necessary for good governance in health care.  The discovery of this previous confidentiality agreement at CMU suggests that such agreements may not be rare in health care.  We have long <a href="http://hcrenewal.blogspot.com/search/label/anechoic%20effect">discussed</a> the anechoic effect in health care, how certain topics and issues are just not to be discussed, especially those that might embarrass or oppose the personal interests of health care leaders.  We have postulated that the effect operates through fear of offending supervisors, colleagues, or those who provide one's pay.  It may be, however, that the anechoic effect has been codified through confidentiality clauses.  As noted above, such codification can mean whistle-blowers may risk lawsuits as well as job loss and ostracism. If there are other codes of silence operative in health care, I hope that sunlight soon shines upon them.  That sunlight may cause such codes to shrivel is suggested by President Rao's rescinding of the code at VCU soon after it was made public, as reported by the Richmond Times-Dispatch: <blockquote>With the board of visitors meeting yesterday to evaluate his performance, Virginia Commonwealth University President Michael Rao rescinded the confidentiality agreements he required employees working in his office to sign. Rao sent employees a letter Wednesday that said the confidentiality agreements were intended "to protect the privacy of my family, particularly my children, in my home." 'The confidentiality agreements have been the subject of recent scrutiny and criticism and, unfortunately, have been misinterpreted in terms of what I sought to be accomplished by these agreements,' he wrote. 'I sincerely regret any undue burden or ill will that these agreements may have caused. Therefore, I have decided to withdraw all such confidentiality agreements.'</blockquote>Such codes ought to be perceived as unethical, and perhaps should be made illegal.  Meanwhile, though, the anechoic effect continues.

VCU President Rao's Previous Code of Silence

We recently posted about the code of silence imposed by Virginia Commonwealth University President Stephen Rao on his staff. It turns out now that this was not his first exercise in imposing a code o…

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06 Dec 2010

A Confidentiality Clause or an Oath of Fealty?

The advancement of modern scientific medicine depends on the search for and dissemination of truth. Academic medicine, like the rest of academia, ought to be based on openness, transparency, and academic freedom. The 1940 American Association of University Professors (AAUP)<a href="http://www.aaup.org/AAUP/pubsres/policydocs/contents/1940statement.htm"> Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure</a> opened with: <blockquote>The common good depends upon the free search for truth and its free exposition. </blockquote>Yet we have written about dark clouds of secrecy spreading over medicine and health care. The increasingly powerful leaders of health care increasingly use opacity and secrecy to keep what they are doing out of the public eye. We have frequently discussed the <a href="http://hcrenewal.blogspot.com/search/label/anechoic%20effect">anechoic effect</a>, how it is just not done to discuss certain topics, particularly those related to the adverse effects of bad (ill-informed, incompetent, self-interested, conflicted, or corrupt) leadership and bad (opaque, unaccountable, mission-hostile, unethical) governance of health care organizations.  People may feel it is unseemly to speak badly of renowned institutions such as hospitals and universities.  People with conflicts of interest may not be inclined to criticize those who pay them.  Now people employed by contemporary health care organizations may have to pledge theri silence to keep their jobs. The latest story in this regard comes from Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU), which includes VCU Health Systems, and MCV Hospital and Physicians.  (Full disclosure: I was a VCU full-time faculty member from 1987-1994, and still am on the adjunct faculty.)  In 2008, the VCU President resigned after the university's secret research contract with a tobacco company, and the President's own position on the board of directors of another tobacco company were revealed (see blog post <a href="http://hcrenewal.blogspot.com/2008/08/after-controversy-over-tobacco-money.html">here</a> and others <a href="http://hcrenewal.blogspot.com/search/label/Virginia%20Commonwealth%20University">here</a>). Michael Rao, the President since 2008, is now under outside review after it was revealed that he required his staff to sign a secrecy pledge.  The <a href="http://www2.timesdispatch.com/news/local-news/2010/nov/17/vcuu17-ar-658103/">story</a> appeared in the Richmond Times-Dispatch: <blockquote>Virginia Commonwealth University President Michael Rao asks employees who work in his office to sign an unusual <a href="http://static.mgnetwork.com/rtd/pdfs/vcuu17.pdf">confidentiality agreement</a> that bars them from talking about what they observe about him or his family. The prohibition goes beyond the standard agreement that university employees sign acknowledging that they can't disclose personal or proprietary information. The agreement, a copy of which was obtained by the Richmond Times-Dispatch, covers interactions at Rao's office and at his residence. It bars disclosure not just to the news media, family or friends, but also to colleagues, 'clergy and attorneys, or to any other person not otherwise identified.' 'I agree that any such disclosure in violation of this nondisclosure agreement could result in irreparable damage and harm to VCU, President Rao, and/or his family'" the agreement states. 'Any such violation or anticipated violation' would entitle Rao to seek 'injunctive relief' in Richmond or Henrico County circuit courts. VCU spokeswoman Pam Lepley said she could not comment immediately yesterday. Several current or former employees of the president's office confirmed that they had been asked to sign the agreement, including Kimberley Busch, Rao's former scheduler. She described it as a 'what happens in the president's office stays in the president's office' agreement.</blockquote> The newly uncovered confidentiality clause provoked strong criticism: <blockquote>Raymond D. Cotton, a Washington attorney who specializes in higher-education governance, said such a confidentiality agreement is highly unusual and goes against the culture of openness and transparency in higher education. 'There is this concept of academic freedom that is broader than the First Amendment,' he said.</blockquote> In fact, since Virginia Commonwealth University is a state-supported institution, the confidentiality clause may be unconstitutional, as <a href="http://www.wtvr.com/news/wtvr-mark-on-vcu-president-111810,0,1379760.story">reported</a> by WTVR: <blockquote>Kent Willis with the Virginia American Civil Liberties Union said the agreement doesn't pass constitutional muster. 'A public employee, no matter where they are in the government, has a right to speak out on matters of public concern,' Willis said. 'That's a U.S. Supreme Court case, it's guaranteed to every public employee by the First Amendment to the Constitution.' Willis said there are numerous legal issues raised by the contract. But, he said, the bottom line problem with the contract 'is the attitude. This is a contract that says 'I'm not transparent. I don't want you to know what is going on. I'm running a closed shop.''</blockquote> Times-Dispatch columnist Michael Paul Williams <a href="http://www2.timesdispatch.com/news/2010/nov/19/mike19-ar-663326/">wrote</a>: <blockquote>VCU, we have a problem. This confidentiality agreement does not inspire confidence. The lack of transparency only gives the appearance that someone's hiding something.</blockquote> He also further quoted Kent Willis: <blockquote>Rao's contract 'fails to address this whistle-blower right and could create conflicts for employees, who are silenced by the employment contract,' yet have a constitutional right to speak out on some matters, Willis said. And as Willis points out, even if a person's constitutional right trumps the contract, how many employees are willing to take that risk? 'Particularly disturbing is the prohibition against talking to an attorney,' he said. 'If an employee believes something illegal is going on at work, an attorney is precisely the person he or she should be talking with.'</blockquote> We just <a href="http://hcrenewal.blogspot.com/2010/07/stifling-whistle-blowers-old-and-new.html">posted</a> about how a pharmaceutical company included a confidentiality clause in a consulting contract, suggesting the deliberate creation of a conflict of interest in order to prevent criticism of the company's products or practices.  However, in several ways, the present example is more insidious.  First, it involves a university, whose mission is to discover and disseminate the truth.  Thus, as noted above, the confidentiality agreement subverts the university's core mission.  Second, it was required of full-time employees who wanted to keep  their jobs, making choose between secrecy and unemployment.  Third, it was particularly harsh, addressing incipient as well as actual disclosure, and including injunctive relief as well as the threat of  termination.  Fourth, it protected not just the organization and its products, but personally protected the organization's leader and his family.  It was not just a contract, but an oath of fealty, as if the CEO were nobility, or even royalty. The good news is that this confidentiality agreement now sits in the glare of sunlight.  One does wonder, however, how many other such agreements are already in force so that the would be nobility who now run too much of health care to avoid any embarassing revelations about what their leadership really is about. We are a long way from the transparency that true health care reform requires.

A Confidentiality Clause or an Oath of Fealty?

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30 Nov 2010

Where There's Smoke? ... A University President Who Simultaneously Lead a Failed Financial Company and a Tobacco Company Which Apologized for International Bribery

A long time ago, in 2006, we first blogged about a "<a href="http://hcrenewal.blogspot.com/2006/03/new-species-of-conflict-of-interest-in.html">new species of conflict of interest</a>" which we thought might prove to be even more important than those afflicting health care that were then starting to be discussed.  This involved health care organizational leaders who were simultaneously members of the boards of directors of for-profit health care corporations.  We posited these conflicts would be particularly important because being on the board of directors entails not just a financial incentive.  It ostensibly requires board members to "demonstrate unyielding loyalty to the company's shareholders" [Per Monks RAG, Minow N. <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Corporate-Governance-Robert-G-Monks/dp/1405116986">Corporate Governance</a>, 3rd edition. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2004. P.200.]   Thus, for example, the conflict posed by the president of a university, to whom a medical school and academic medical center report, who also is the director of a pharmaceutical company, would be extreme. Since then, we<a href="http://hcrenewal.blogspot.com/2010/02/university-president-but-no-longer.html"> noted</a> yet another variant on this theme, university presidents who were supposedly the top leaders of failed financial firms, and then who did various dances to try to avoid accountability for these firms' fates.  That theme recently made it to the big time, a <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/01/business/01prez.html">front page article</a> on the Sunday Business section of the New York Times. The most extreme version was the case of that of Eugene Trani, the former President of Virginia Commonwealth University ( full disclosure: I spent 7 years on the faculty of its medical school, and am still an adjunct faculty member).  Trani turned out to be on the board of a tobacco company, and soon after this was revealed, retired from the presidency (see most recent blog post <a href="http://hcrenewal.blogspot.com/2008/08/after-controversy-over-tobacco-money.html">here</a>). Now a Washington Post blogger has yet another <a href="http://voices.washingtonpost.com/local-opinions/2010/08/why_are_college_heads_doing_on.html">twist</a> on this case: <blockquote>Eugene P. Trani left the presidency of Virginia Commonwealth University in 2009 after improving the school and expanding its presence in downtown Richmond. But Trani was also a director of LandAmerica Financial Group, a Richmond-area title insurer that went belly-up in 2008, taking with it millions in investors' money. Today, Trani is on the board of Richmond-based Universal Corporation, a global tobacco marketer. Universal's subsidiaries have just agreed to pay $8.98 million in a tobacco bribery scandal that stretches from Brazil to Thailand to Africa. The firm has issued a public apology. Trani received $159,032 in total compensation for his board service.</blockquote> So Trani was not only on the board of directors of a tobacco company, he was on the board of directors of a tobacco company that was forced to settle charges of international bribery and issue apologies for same, and just to ice the cake, was on the board of a failed financial company whose failure affected residents of the locality which his university served. As the saying goes, "the fish rots from the head down."  How can academic leaders expect integrity from their faculty when they willingly take on such grotesque conflicts?  Leaders who thus try to serve two, or many masters are likely to run health care organizations that do not serve their primary constituents, patients who expect good care, learners who expect honest, competent teaching, and the public who expects important, unbiased research, well.  If we really want to reform health care, we need leaders who put the mission, not their own pocketbooks, prestige, and cronies, first.

Where There's Smoke? ... A University President Who Simultaneously Lead a Failed Financial Company and a Tobacco Company Which Apologized for International Bribery

A long time ago, in 2006, we first blogged about a "new species of conflict of interest" which we thought might prove to be even more important than those afflicting health care that were then startin…

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20 Aug 2010

We're Only In It for the Money: the Disproportionate Funding of University Administrators by Academic Medicine

We have previously <a href="http://hcrenewal.blogspot.com/2007/04/medical-schools-to-faculty-show-me.html">discussed</a> how academic medical leadership seems to care more about how much money their faculty bring in than their clinical, teaching or research performance. Why academic medicine came to put money ahead of mission has never been clear. However, a little bit of insight has been (probably inadvertently) provided by an announcement of a new university president. After the early resignation of President Trani, under fire for his coziness with tobacco money (see post<a href="http://hcrenewal.blogspot.com/2008/08/after-controversy-over-tobacco-money.html"> here </a>and links backwards), Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) just announced its new President, Michael Rao. The <a href="http://www.news.vcu.edu/news.aspx?v=detail&nid=2801">official announcement </a>of his appointment included: <blockquote> The VCU Board approved Rao’s salary of $488,500, $176,113 of which is paid by state funds and $312,387 from VCU Health System and private funds, for the positions of VCU president and president of the VCU Health System. His total compensation package, approved by the board, also includes $66,500 in deferred compensation, a $60,000 housing allowance, and use of a car, all paid by private funds. Separate from the compensation package, Rao will receive a signing bonus of $275,000, paid by private funds. He will be required to repay $200,000 if he leaves the university within five years. </blockquote> This announcement is unusual, perhaps unique, in that it breaks down the sources of a university president's salary. Very few universities publish any details about their budgets, and hardly ever explain money flows among their different sub-divisions. What is striking is that 63% of President Rao's salary will come from the health center. However, the health center only accounts for about one-eighth of the university's students. (<a href="http://www.vcu.edu/about/">Total university enrollment </a>is more than 32,000, and 2008 <a href="http://www.healthsciences.vcu.edu/pdfs/FY08QUICKFACTCARD.pdf">Health Sciences enrollment </a>was 4278.) So, the president of a university will derive approximately five times more of his funding from the health sciences division of the university than would be expected by the size of that division. I suspect that this situation is not unique, or even uncommon. What is unique is that VCU has made it public. (Note also that President Rao's total compensation, while far more than that of the average faculty member, is nowhere near as outrageous as that of some other university presidents. Finally, in the interests of disclosure, I should note that I was a full-time faculty member at VCU from 1987-1994, and still serve as an adjunct faculty member there.) In my experience and humble opinion, it seems that the pressure academic leaders put on their faculty to bring in ever increasing amounts of money is out of proportion to the needs of academic medical centers or medical schools, or even the greed of their leaders. Instead, it may be that academic medical centers and medical schools, in turn, are under pressure to be the cash cows of their universities. Many universities have expanded their administrative staffs and budgets, and raised the salaries of their top leaders far more than inflation or increases in enrollment would justify. They have also erected palatial buildings, funded extravagant sports programs, and provided students luxuries unheard of when the baby boomers went off to college. University leaders may well have taken advantage of the abundant money flowing through health care, especially that supplied by pharmaceutical, biotechnology and device companies to generate research and "education" to market their products, and that supplied by a physician and hospital reimbursement system rigged to pay handsomely for an ever increasing number of procedures (see post <a href="http://hcrenewal.blogspot.com/2009/02/what-ruc-again-one-of-worlds-most.html">here</a>). But having become accustomed to this money to fund expansive administrative budgets, it is no wonder that university leaders have pushed for more and more financial production from medical school faculty, no matter what. And funded by their cash cow academic medical sub-divisions, it is no wonder that university leaders have turned a blind eye towards, if not actively encouraged financial entanglements by faculty and administrators that would dull their scruples about the sources and reasons for their outside financial support. If we want universities and their academic medical components to go back to putting their mission before their margins, we need to wean university leaders off the narcotic of surplus funds provided by their academic medical sub-divisions' external financial support.

We're Only In It for the Money: the Disproportionate Funding of University Administrators by Academic Medicine

We have previously discussed how academic medical leadership seems to care more about how much money their faculty bring in than their clinical, teaching or research performance. Why academic medicine…

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01 Mar 2009

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