Massachusetts' Top Hospital Execs Often Sit On Health Companies' Boards. Some Doctors Say It's Unethical.

A recent investigation from the Boston Globe's Spotlight team uncovered that hospital presidents and CEOs are moonlighting on for-profit company boards.

Some defended the practice, saying that it encouraged greater collaboration between the hospitals and health-related companies. But more than 100 physicians, researchers, residents and students from Harvard-affiliated hospitals across the city sent a petition to university and hospital officials calling for stronger ethics rules, which would ban these simultaneous positions outright.

“They’re not only busy jobs, they’re conflicting,” said one of the petition’s co-authors, Dr. Carolyn Becker. “To be president of a hospital, a CEO of a hospital, and have an alliance to a corporation, a company, a fiduciary responsibility to another entity seems to us like a clear conflict of interest.

“Committing that time, taking it away from your main job, is wrong,” she went on. “We want collaborations, but they should be very minimally compensated, no stock options. ... Where is the evidence that that collaboration has helped the people who work, or the patients who come to that hospital? I don’t see it.”

On Greater Boston Wednesday, Jim Braude discussed the quandry with Becker, an endocrinologist at Brigham and Women's Hospital and an associate professor at Harvard Medical School.

WATCH: Dr. Becker On The “Clear Conflict Of Interest”