Prescriber Education and Outreach (Academic Detailing) for Drug Safety and Effectiveness

Pharmaceutical businesses routinely promote medicines to physicians and other prescribers with profit as their primary motivation, resulting in wide-spread prescribing of medicines of questionable safety expense. They often use detailers for this purpose, i.e., salespeople who visit physicians and personally promote these medicines.

Academic detailing counters these visits with health care professionals trained in using the best science to prescribe medicines. This presentation will describe how academic detailing works, how it can affect drug safety and costs, and an update on where in the U.S. it is being practiced. The presentation will provide the research findings on the effectiveness of academic detailing, including its impact on health care costs. This presentation will also discuss opportunities for support for academic detailing from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality and the latest developments in state funding supporting it.