Founded in 2010 and operating within Brigham & Women's Division of Pharmacoepidemiology & Pharmacoeconomics [DoPE], our resource center supports clinical outreach education programs across the United States, Canada, and beyond.
Whether we're training new educators on effective social marketing techniques, helping organizations develop their programs, creating and refining resources and tools to strengthen educators' success rates, helping programs evaluate their impact, or connecting educators through our extensive Partner Network and annual conference series, we're always working to increase the impact of clinical outreach education.
Our Impact: Improving Success for Frontline Health Educators
Through our techniques trainings, conference series, customized consultation, and materials development, we're helping clinical health educators build longterm relationships with frontline clinicians. Those clinicians then make better, evidence-based decisions, and those decisions improve the health of diverse populations, including underserved patients who need it the most.
The result? Increased cancer screenings, reduced overmedication in the elderly, more access to sexual health education resources, fewer overdoses from opioid addiction, and more. Learn about the various clinical areas we support, and how our partners' interventions are improving health outcomes across the nation.
AD 101: What's "Academic Detailing" or "Clinical Outreach Education"?
Pioneered by NaRCAD co-director Jerry Avorn, MD, academic detailing [AD] is an innovative, 1-on-1 outreach education technique that helps clinicians provide evidence-based care to their patients.
Using an accurate, up-to-date synthesis of the best clinical evidence in an engaging format, academic detailers ignite clinician behavior change, which ultimately improves patient health.
A successful AD visit is highly interactive, always a dialogue, and continuously assesses a clinician’s individual needs in order to promote better prescribing, screening, and patient education.
Why do clinicians need educational visits?
Busy clinicians need an accurate, ongoing source of current data about the comparative effectiveness, safety, and cost of treatments. Clinicians have many competing demands for their time; trying on their own to assemble current evidence from a continuous influx of research is incredibly challenging. As a result, many clinicians may be unaware if better alternatives exist for prescribing, prevention, screening, and patient education.
That's where AD steps in. Combining an interactive outreach approach with best evidence, trained academic detailers meet with clinicians to assess individual needs, and needs of the practice. These educators then offer tailored, evidence-based clinical recommendations.