Α new study in the Archives of Internal Medicine suggests that academic detailing may improve physicians’ adherence to clinical guidelines, findings that boost AHRQ’s recent announcement to back 9000 academic detailing visits over the next three years.
Using the not-so-memorably-named ALLHAT/JNC7 Dissemination Project, researchers looked at office-based academic detailing visits to more than 18,000 physicians in 41 states between 2004-2007 and correlated data from a national pharmacy database. The ALLHAT clinical trial, published in 2002, found that the use of thiazide-type diuretic, an antihypertensive, lowered risk of heart attack. Prescribing of thiazide-type diuretic during 2004-2007 in counties that received academic detailing visits rose 8.7 percent, but only 3.9 percent in those without academic detailing programs.
This study was conducted using county level data, so causal associations between educational interactions and prescribing at the individual physician level could not be established. Still, this paper supplements a body of evidence suggesting that academic detailing visits can improve physicians’ awareness of and reliance on evidence-based clinical guidelines.
Academic detailing sends physicians, pharmacists, nurses and other clinical professionals into practice settings to give unbiased, balanced, evidenced-based information to prescribers on the safety and efficacy of certain drugs. I wrote about academic detailing as one piece of the evidence-based prescribing policy puzzle here.
--Kate Petersen, PostScript blogger