Healthy Skepticism Library item: 13007

Warning: This library includes all items relevant to health product marketing that we are aware of regardless of quality. Often we do not agree with all or part of the contents.

Publication type: news

Reck JL.
Academic Detailing Informational Summit
National Legislative Association on Prescription Drug Prices 2008 Feb 11
http://www.reducedrugprices.org/read.asp?news=1100

Notes:

Follow link to NLARx site to access presentations mentioned in this report.

Full text:

A group of leading medical professionals, health educators, policy makers and advocates met to hear presentations on a range of existing academic detailing programs as the first step in a Northern New England-wide initiative to develop a collaborative academic detailing program.

Academic detailing refers to educational outreach to physicians by healthcare professionals to discuss the complete body of evidence concerning which drugs are safest and most appropriate in a given situation. This valuable service makes it easy for busy doctors to get the up-to-date, unbiased information they want in order to optimize their prescribing in terms of efficacy, safety and cost-effectiveness.

The keynote address was given by Dr. Jerry Avorn of Brigham and Women’s Hospital / Harvard University. Avorn invented the concept of academic detailing in the 80s and also conducted many of the randomized clinical trials that have shown academic detailing works. He described the Independent Drug Information Service (iDiS), a service he runs which provides high-quality educational materials to the academic detailing program in Pennsylvania which is funded by the PACE program. Dr. Avorn emphasized that all of iDiS’s materials are made freely available for non-commercial use at www.rxfacts.org.

Dr. Charles MacLean and pharmacist Amanda Kennedy spoke about Vermont’s academic detailing service which is housed in the University of Vermont College of Medicine’s Office of Primary Care and Area Health Education Centers . Their program uses a group model and has been particularly successful reaching out to rural practitioners. It demonstrates that academic detailing can do a lot with a little – operating on a budget of just 50,000 a year.

An international perspective was provided by Dr. Michael Allen of the Dalhousie Academic Detailing Service (Halifax, Nova Scotia). Canada has academic detailing programs in five provinces which actively collaborate with one another through an umbrella organization.

Frank May, a pharmacist from Australia who is currently a Visiting Clinical Professor at Harvard Medical School and Associate Scientist within the Brigham & Women’s Hospital, spoke about the wide-scale experience with academic detailing in Australia. Their program, known as the Drug and Therapeutics Information Service (DATIS), has been in operation for 16 years and currently makes more than 9,000 physician visits a year.

Sarah Ball, a pharmacist from the University of South Carolina, spoke about an academic detailing program funded by a Medicaid grant which was recently launched in several counties in South Carolina and is currently focusing on mental health-related prescribing.

Marcia Hams of the Boston-based Prescription Project, presented the Drug Effectiveness Review Project (DERP), a program housed in the Oregon Health and Science University. DERP is a collaboration which obtains the best available evidence on effectiveness and safety comparisons between drugs in the same class. Twelve states are currently members of DERP and use the information it provides to inform public policy and decision making related to prescription drugs.