An interview with Kelsey Bolton, Continuing Professional Development Consultant, Gundersen Health System
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by Anna Morgan, RN, BSN, MPH, NaRCAD Program Manager

​Tags: Detailing Visits, COVID-19, CME, E-Detailing, Smoking Cessation, Substance Use

Anna: Hi, Kelsey! Thanks for taking the time to chat with us today.  Can you tell us a bit about your academic detailing program in Wisconsin and your role?

Kelsey: I’m a Continuing Professional Development Consultant in the Continuing Medical Education (CME) Department at Gundersen Health System. Gundersen Health System is a teaching hospital with a multitude of specialties that serves patients in Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Iowa.

As part of my CME work, academic detailing stood out as an effective tool to disseminate our information and meet our clinicians’ educational needs. We started our detailing program last fall and have been focused on tobacco cessation.  The detailing intervention is a spinoff of a performance improvement project we are working on for diabetes.

I’m currently a one-woman show; I’m the program coordinator and the sole detailer.  I detail physicians, NPs and PAs across the health system. 

Anna: Wow, it’s incredible that you’ve been able to build your detailing program from the ground up! Can you tell us what that’s been like?

Kelsey: Academic detailing was a new concept to me prior to being introduced to it by my former manager, who sent me to the NaRCAD training in May 2019.
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Academic detailing is not a well-known concept in our hospital system.  It was difficult to get past the gatekeepers and “enlighten” them about academic detailing.  There are still misconceptions when I walk into a room for a meeting with a clinician – they often think that I’m a drug sales rep, that I’m an internal quality control person, or that I’m there for punitive reasons.  I must quickly refute that and explain that I’m there to support and unburden them, not to make judgments about their work.

Anna:  Those misconceptions are quite common when starting a new academic detailing program. How are you able to “enlighten” the gatekeepers?

Kelsey: It was bumpy at first and we tried a few different approaches, but I think we’ve finally been able to smooth it out. I have an advantage because I’m internal and I’m contacting clinicians from an internal email or phone number.  I’ve also had our medical program coordinator, the doctor who is partnering with me to learn the clinical information, send out emails to gatekeepers prior to my detailing visits.   
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Anna: Stakeholder buy-in is imperative when building a new detailing program.

Kelsey: Absolutely. Building relationships with key stakeholders has made all the difference.  The medical program coordinator I work with, as well as other experts in the organization, helped me curate my detailing aid and key messages. 

I practiced my detailing sessions with these stakeholders before going out in the field.  It was an easy way to build relationships and get them on board – it only took a 15-minute practice detailing session!

I’m also fortunate enough to have support from senior leadership. They’ve been able to open doors by letting people throughout the organization know that they support the academic detailing work I’m doing. 
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Anna: It sounds like both managing your academic detailing program and being in the field has helped you be successful in getting your program off the ground. What has it been like to grow and manage your AD program?

Kelsey: It’s like herding cats! The detailing program is 25% of my workload, so completing all the administrative work plus the detailing visits is quite a commitment.  By the end of this year, I will have detailed over 200 clinicians. 

“Marathon detailing” has put me in a groove. It has definitely been challenging, but I appreciate that I know the ins and outs of it now – both the administrative tasks and the field work.  I feel prepared to help train others. I plan to start training one of my colleagues to become a detailer in the fall.
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Anna: When thinking about team expansion, it’s also important to think about the impact of COVID-19.  How has COVID-19 impacted your program?

Kelsey: We paused our detailing visits for about 3 months, and by the time we started talking about bringing them back, NaRCAD was putting out a lot of information about e-Detailing. 
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Before COVID, I had barely done anything with video calling, but getting thrown into working from home, we jumped into a lot of video calls. I learned how to work virtually on the fly, which made it easier to adapt to e-Detailing. 

I did a few practice e-Detailing sessions with my colleagues and I’ve now successfully completed several visits virtually.  The NaRCAD webinars were a lifesaver.  We plan to continue e-Detailing until it’s safe to return to in-person visits.
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Anna: A lot of academic detailing programs had to adapt quickly to e-Detailing during the pandemic.  What does the future look like for your program?

Kelsey: For the more near future, we are working on collecting data for the tobacco cessation campaign to eventually publish research on the efficacy of the academic detailing intervention.  We’re going to pull patient data from the EMR, as well as look at the qualitative data from the evaluation surveys. This research will help inform our organization on the benefits of academic detailing as an educational intervention.
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We would also like to continue the program with other strategic initiatives like substance use disorder, social determinants of health, and cancer screening.  I have a soft spot for topics similar to tobacco cessation that are sometimes discouraging to clinicians because they don’t feel like they can make a difference. I know that through detailing, I’m able to give them a fresh take on these topics, and reinvigorate them in providing the best care for their patients.

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Biography. Kelsey Bolton is a Continuing Professional Development Consultant in the CME department at Gundersen Health System in La Crosse, WI and the program lead for its Academic Detailing program. She received her Bachelor of Arts degree in Communication Studies in 2015, Healthcare CPD Certificate in 2019, and is currently pursuing her Master’s in Organizational Leadership. She has completed over 100 detailing visits and is presently conducting a research project on the efficacy of tobacco cessation academic detailing.

Tags: Autism, CME, Conference, Detailing Visits, Pediatrics, Practice Facilitation, Training
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​NaRCAD: Hi, Meagan and Mindy—thanks for taking the time to talk with us about your clinical outreach education programming at Colorado ABCD. Can you give us an overview about ABCD and its mission to improve child development?

Meagan Shallcross: Colorado Assuring Better Child Health & Development (ABCD) works with community partners, pediatric healthcare providers, early learning providers, and families across Colorado communities. The goal is to strengthen systems and identify children with developmental delays, connecting them with community services as early as possible.

Mindy Craig: My path to healthcare improvement is a little different than what you might expect.  I worked for Northwest Airlines as a flight attendant for several years straight out of college.  At that time the airline industry was losing a large amount of money and needed to find a new way of operating.  They decided to utilize a Total Quality Management approach and enlisted people from every department to undergo training in TQM and then facilitate small departmental groups in quality efforts.  It was through this process that I began to understand the importance of doing business with a quality framework.

Eventually, I left Northwest and started working in a Neurology clinic while going back to school with the goal of becoming a PA.   After completing my degree I worked in primary care settings for about 10 years.  I participated in small clinic QI efforts over the years and continued to be interested in quality improvement.

I was hired by ABCD 8 years ago to bring a clinical perspective to their physician outreach.   It was a natural progression for me to start approaching our work at ABCD with a quality improvement framework.  The power of engaging front line staff to implement changes that result in improvement remains as strong as it was when I worked in the airline industry. 
 
NaRCAD: Talk with us about your academic detailing programming at ABCD—you’ve been doing this for about 10 years, right?

Mindy: We started our work  encouraging the use of standardized developmental screening tools in the primary care settings.  This was supported by the American Academy of Pediatrics policy statement in 2006 recommending the use of these tools at well child visits.  We offered informal outreach to physicians providing instructions on screening tools, billing information, AAP recommendations and information on referral resources.
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We quickly recognized that screening alone wasn’t sufficient and began talking about the referral process and how to ensure successful referrals were being made.  At around this time, research was showing us that only about 50% of children referred for Early Intervention services were actually connecting to that referral.  It was easy to identify children with concerns but not as easy to ensure they received needed support.
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We decided to try formalizing our approach to outreach by offering Continuing Medical Education [CME] credits.  While we didn’t change content, offering CME changed the way providers saw us as detailers.  We appreciated the new credibility, but still struggled with recruiting new practices.

NaRCAD:  Recruiting practices to participate is a challenge for many programs. How did this struggle transform into quality improvement?

We now offer Quality Improvement [QI] and MOC projects for implementing developmental screening, autism screening and postpartum depression screening in addition to a project that aims to increase the percentage of children who successfully connect with Early Intervention when referred from their primary care provider.  We have been thrilled with the response from physicians for participating in these projects and just received funding to continue and grow our outreach efforts. 

NaRCAD: What have been some other challenges you’ve faced when going in to talk to clinicians about implementing developmental screening?

Mindy:  I started working at ABCD unsure of how to provide physician outreach, so I naturally modeled my efforts on the one successful approach I knew very well, which was pharmaceutical sales.  As the recipient of pharmaceutical detailing, it was pretty easy to begin my outreach efforts in a similar fashion.  I quickly learned how it feels to be a detailer.  Front office staff rejected me repeatedly, I made hundreds of phone calls that didn’t get returned, and when I did get to speak to a provider I had to speak quickly and to the point to keep their attention.  The challenge of gaining access was the biggest barrier I confronted early on and remains at the top of the list.

​NaRCAD: When dealing with those challenges, what’s helped you to build relationships with clinicians in order to gain commitment?

Meagan: To deal with the challenges that arise, we have found that it helps to get creative in our approach to gain access to clinicians and add credibility to our messages. A barrier we have encountered when trying to schedule times to meet with clinicians is the expectation that we will provide food. Our funders and budgets do not allow us to pay for food, so we have opted to provide other incentives for clinicians, such as CME or MOC credit. Not only is offering CME/MOC credits an educational incentive for providers, but it lends credibility to our messages. We facilitate our QI projects through multiple meetings at the practice and have found that, by developing relationships and a presence in the office, we can overcome clinicians’ resistance to implementing screening or other changes in their practice. 

NaRCAD:  What other advice would give to a new and emerging AD program that’s just getting started, or that you’d give yourself if you could go back in time 10 years?

Meagan: We have found NaRCAD’s training and tips to be very helpful, so we would recommend that new clinical educators attend a NaRCAD techniques training to hone their skills in communicating their messages with clinicians and gaining commitment to behavior change. One of our main takeaways from the NaRCAD conference was the importance of high-quality, professional materials, so we would recommend that new programs budget for the development of professional materials as well as food, which can be an incentive when setting up meetings with clinicians.

Over the years, we’ve realized how critical it is to work with community partners before going into healthcare practices to ensure that clinical workflows, such as processes for making referrals to external agencies, are aligned with community-defined processes and so that clinicians are aware of the resources available to patients and families in their communities.

NaRCAD: Thanks so much for sharing important insights from your program to improve childhood health outcomes. We look forward to seeing you at a future training and hearing more about your program's future successes!

Mindy Craig, PA-C, M.S., Director of Physician Outreach, has been with the ABCD team for 8 years and brings with her experience in the clinical setting.  She earned her physician assistant degree at the University of Colorado Health Science Center’s Child Health Associate/Physician Assistant program in May 2000.  Concurrently, she completed additional course work and research to earn her Master of Science degree in Pediatrics.  Ms. Craig worked as a physician assistant in a number of settings for ten years prior to joining the ABCD team.  Her medical career has included a variety of medical office positions from medical records clerk to practice manager.  This range of experience positions her to fully understand the unique dynamics and flow in a typical office, which allows her to deliver technical assistance to practices at a meaningful level.
 
Ms. Craig’s quality improvement experience began in the business sector where she was extensively trained on Total Quality Management (TQM) at Northwest Airlines.  She worked at the airline as a facilitator, training inflight and ground personnel in the principles of quality improvement.  This experience with quality continued in the clinical setting, as she has participated in and/or chaired a number of quality improvement projects over her career as a physician assistant. In addition to her work at ABCD, Ms. Craig also does consulting work for organizations needing assistance with physician outreach and education. 

Meagan Shallcross, MPH, Healthy Steps/Physician Outreach Coordinator, joined the ABCD team in June 2015 as the Healthy Steps and Physician Outreach Coordinator. Meagan is passionate about building systems and environments that support children’s healthy development through clinical-community partnerships and integrated care delivery approaches. Meagan earned a Master of Public Health degree at the University of Michigan, where she supported Patient and Family Centered Care projects at the university health system and was involved with community-based participatory research addressing health equity, as well as research focused on provider-patient communication. 

Learn more at www.coloradoabcd.org. All photos used with permission.