Concerned about the influence drugmakers may have on medical education, the renowned institution is expected to announce today that it will severely restrict industry financing of doctors’ continuing education at its medical school, according to The New York Times.

The move comes amid growing criticism that industry-sponsored CME is designed to promote specific products, while pharma maintains its money is intended solely to keep doctors up to date. To sort it out, Stanford plans to announce that it will no longer let drug and device makers specify which courses they wish to finance. Instead, companies will be asked to contribute only to a schoolwide pool of money that can be used for any class, even ones that never mention products, the Times writes.

With its approach, Stanford becomes the sixth major medical school - including med schools at the universities of Massachusetts, Pittsburgh, Colorado, Kansas and California Davis - to form schoolwide pools for university contributions to medical education, according to the Prescription Project, a nonprofit organization that largely opposes industry financed CME. The Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, meanwhile, has banned all industry support for its doctor classes.

David Korn, chief scientific officer of the Association of American Medical Colleges, tells the Times that Stanford’s new policy was “an extremely important step forward.” The association recommended in June that medical schools pool contributions from companies as a means of shielding teachers from commercial influences. Here is the recommendation.

Ken Johnson, a senior vp at PhRMA, tells the Times that “America’s pharmaceutical research companies have taken positive steps to help ensure they provide nothing but accurate and balanced information to health care providers.”

Philip Pizzo, dean of Stanford’s School of Medicine, tells the paperthat the school wanted to take a firm stand on the issue, even if it meant that drug and device makers might no longer contribute to the educational effort if they could not specify which classes they wanted to support. “I want to make sure we’re not marketing for industry or being influenced by their marketing,” he says.

The policy comes in the wake of growing scrutiny of industry financing of doctor education. Last year, US Senator Chuck Grassley, an Iowa Republican on the Senate Finance Committee, issued a report that documented how drug makers used the classes to increase sales of their latest products. In an e-mail statement, Grassley wrote the paper that, “Reforms based on transparency can foster accountability and build confidence in medical education and, in turn, the practice of medicine.”

Since Grassley began his investigation, a growing number of drugmakers have begun to make public their lists of educational grant recipients, and Pfizer recently announced that it would no longer directly support CME companies, which deliver many of the classes that docs attend and may be more susceptible to industry influence than ones based at medical schools.

Doctors have grown accustomed to taking educational classes free - often with a lunch included. Separating commercial influences from doctor education might require doctors to pay their own way, which some doctors have said they would resist, the Times writes.

Murray Kopelow, chief executive of the Accreditation Council for Continuing Medical Education, tells the paper that Stanford’s new policy was part of a growing push in medical education to further separate crucial medical information from marketing messages. “It’s a good plan, and it’s a big deal that a place like Stanford has adopted it,” Kopelow tells the Times. “When this is all over, medical education will not be the same as what it’s been.”