Talk about a conflict of interest?

According to the New York Times, Connecticut's attorney general has pressured a consulting group of hospital executives, the Healthcare Research and Development Institute (HRDI), to agree to "stop selling marketing advice to vendors who do millions of dollars in business with nonprofit hospitals across the nation, including their own." Gee, is that a conflict of interest? Duh!

The agreement, Mr. Blumenthal said, “shatters an anticompetitive, secret society, an elite and exclusive club of premier hospital executives and select hospital supply businesses that restrained competition to the detriment of patients and providers.”

The settlement, he said, did not end his investigation of hospital vendors.

H.R.D.I., which was founded five decades ago as an educational group, will change from a profit-making company into a nonprofit group financed only by hospitals or their executives. Supply companies may not initially join the new group, called the Health Education Network, nor will they be permitted to have any financial links to it.

The settlement, under which the group agreed to pay a $150,000 fine, ends a two-year investigation by Mr. Blumenthal, who found that some suppliers had increased their sales at hospitals run by H.R.D.I. members after paying consulting fees to those members, investigators said. The names of those vendors and hospitals were not included in the settlement agreement, which applied only to H.R.D.I. and not individual members.

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