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Hospitals & Health Network's second installment of a series offering proven techniques to improve quality and reduce medical errors profiles the growing hospitalist movement.

At a national conference on clinical research last week, the incoming head of the federal government's new Office for Human Research Protections, Greg Koski, surprised his audience by suggesting that some conflicts should be avoided. His support for the idea that scientists should have no financial ties to companies whose products they are testing hints at an upcoming shift in government rules that govern the relationship between scientists and the pharmaceutical industry. But most of the discussion at the conference revolved around questions of how to "manage" conflicts rather than do away with them.

Allegations of lax safety procedures and flawed management in a clinical cancer trial have cost four researchers and administrators their jobs at the University of Oklahoma. They have also led to a temporary shutdown of 75 clinical trials at the university's Health Science Center in Tulsa and a sweeping overhaul of the school's process for approving human experiments. University officials emphasize that none of the roughly 100 patients involved in the 3-year-old study of an experimental cancer vaccine was known to have been harmed, and that most trials will soon be restarted.

As Congress steps up oversight of human clinical trials, the Administration is getting a high-level manager of its own to watch out for the interests of volunteers in U.S.-financed research. As expected, Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS) Donna Shalala last week named anesthesiologist E. Greg Koski, 50, to run a new HHS Office for Human Research Protections.