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CADTH » Resources » Academic Detailing Templates » Academic Detailing Material Overview

Academic Detailing Material Overview

Materials provided to primary care practitioners, for the purpose of direct education or provision to patients, represent an important component of academic detailing interventions. Our objective was to collect and review academic detailing intervention materials from a variety of programs in order to provide a template of best practices in intervention materials.

All academic detailing organizations we surveyed provided some form of written materials to their target physician audience. These materials varied greatly in design, length, purpose and function. One of the key deliverables of this section was to develop an inventory of materials that can be utilized as examples in the potential development of a new program’s own materials. Materials from the following organizations were collected for the inventory:

  • British Columbia Community Drug Utilization Program (BC CDUP)
  • Alberta Drug Utilization Program (ADUP)
  • RxFiles, note that this organization is based in Saskatchewan 
  • Prescription Information Services of Manitoba (PrISM)
  • Dalhousie Continuing Medical Education: Academic Detailing Service (ADS), note that this organization is based in Nova Scotia 
  • Independent Drug Information Service (iDiS), note that this organization is based at Harvard in Massachusetts, United States 
  • Drug and Therapeutic Information Services (DATIS), note that this organization is based in Kentucky, United States 
  • National Prescribing Service Limited (NPS), note that this organization is based in Sydney, Australia

We grouped and sub-grouped the materials to allow for cataloguing and evaluation. The analyses of the materials are provided as follows:

  • Section #1: Newsletters
  • Section #2: Prescribing Aids
    • Drug/Disease References
    • Risk Calculators
    • Case Studies
  • Section #3: Patient Information Materials

Each section contains a methods section with the detailed methodology used to evaluate the academic detailing materials. This is followed by a brief summary of the results. More detailed individual evaluation results will accompany each sample of academic detailing materials. The limitations of these evaluations are also reviewed. The discussion will consider the importance of the academic detailing material type, content and format issues of the material and process issues related to their production. Finally, all of this information and lessons learned are synthesized into the other key component of our deliverable, the template recommendations that will be used to guide the production of future academic detailing materials.

In total, we catalogued and evaluated 68 pieces from academic detailing materials. Paper copies of all of the pieces we evaluated are included in the Appendices. In addition, electronic copies of most of the pieces are included in the CD that accompanies this report. We have provided our evaluation and template recommendations for each group (Newsletters, Prescribing Aids, Patient Information Materials).

Background or reference documents, produced by many of the academic detailing organizations, are considered in Deliverable #2 entitled “Academic Detailer Training and Resource Material”.