Following the scandals around the financial ties between doctors and drug companies, the Cleveland Clinic is among the firsts to announce the beginning of the process of disclosing the business ties its doctors and researchers have with big pharmaceutical companies and medical device makers.

The hope from Cleveland Clinic, one of the nation’s leading medical centers, is that this gesture of transparency will be able to prevent any conflicts of interest in the future. This may also serve as an example for other medical centers to follow. “Since many of us have relationships with industry to help foster new and improved products and drugs, we thought we could eliminate potential conflicts of interest by being absolutely transparent about those issues,” said Dr. Toby Cosgrove, CEO of the Cleveland Clinic.

The clinic has already begun posting on its Web site the names of physicians and researchers and the drug companies they are working with. The clinic says that fewer than a quarter of its physicians have anything to disclose. Officials at the Cleveland clinic say patients can find out about the financial relationships anonymously, without asking their doctors directly.

Senator Charles Grassley, who first discovered these ties between doctors and drug companies, says he knows that certain drugmakers are paying doctors to help promote their drugs. In October, Sen. Grassley revealed that Dr. Charles B. Nemeroff of Emory University, a prominent Emory University figure, received at least $2.8 million in consulting fees from companies whose drugs he was evaluating and failed to report income of more than $1.2 million, thus violating federal regulations.

Working with medical device makers and pharmaceutical companies, however, has some positive aspects as well, as it may help research.