The University of Minnesota Medical School has asked an internal panel to examine payments some university physicians have received from pharmaceutical companies, and consider whether the money creates conflicts of interest or influences patient-care decisions, the St. Paul Pioneer Press reported.

The decision follows a report by the research group Public Citizen, which was published in The Journal of the American Medical Association in March, that showed doctors across Minnesota, including some at the medical school, had collected more than $30-million from drug companies between 2002 and 2004 in consulting fees and other payments. More than a year earlier, medical educators writing in The Journal had urged academic medical centers to crack down on gifts — even token ones — from pharmaceutical companies. A Columbia University-based research group started a project this year to encourage more teaching hospitals to put such bans in place.

The Minnesota medical school has not called for a ban. However, its dean, Deborah E. Powell, wrote in a memorandum in May that the institution needed “to examine an area in which we may have some vulnerabilities: our relationships with pharmaceutical companies,” the St. Paul newspaper reported. —Charles Huckabee