Curated By: Aanchal Gupta, Program Coordinator, NaRCAD

Tags: Stigma​, Primary Care, Data

Time and time again we’ve heard about the challenges detailers face when tackling clinician stigma. Detailers have shared comments from clinicians such as, “We don’t take those types of patients” or “I don’t want to be known as the gay doctor.”
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Addressing stigma and fostering understanding with clinicians can often feel overwhelming for detailers. In this edition of “AD-vice” we shine a light on these issues and share experiences from our community on how they managed stigma during detailing visits. 

Understanding Stigma
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• “Whenever I address something uncomfortable with a provider, stigma or otherwise, I try to create an environment where we can work collaboratively on the issue and the provider feels as though I am a resource for them. – Jessica Alward, MA, New Hampshire Bureau of Infectious Disease Control

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• “One of the biggest myths about stigma is that some people carry it, and some people don’t. However, stigma is not binary, and we all possess the ability to stigmatize another group that we perceive to be an ‘outsider’ group. Historically, stigma has appeared mainly in the form of social inclusion, with those identified as ‘others’ being treated as societal outcasts.” - NaRCAD

 

• “Imagine that the clinicians or people you detail hold stigma not because they want to stigmatize others, but for some more relatable reasons: they’re impressionable, they’re naïve, they’re vulnerable. In the same way that a clinician wouldn’t expect someone with a substance use disorder to suddenly recover if harshly confronted, we can’t expect the person who stigmatizes to respond to similar tactics.” – Zack Dumont, BSP, ACPR, MSPharm, RxFiles Academic Detailing Service

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• “Stigma isn’t something that folks are actively choosing, it’s more of what they’ve been taught. Changing that culture of practice is much more difficult compared to asking prescribers to prescribe cholesterol-lowering therapy. There’s very little societal baggage when it comes to improving cholesterol than there is when it comes to destigmatizing addictions or chronic pain.” – Andrew Suchocki, MD, MPH, Clackamas Health Centers

Addressing Stigma through Education and Conversations
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• “We’re approaching [stigma] with education and lots of conversations, since we’ve found that helping our staff to get a better sense of addiction as a disease is really invaluable to making them more open to [medications for opioid use disorder (MOUD)] and treating people with opioid use disorder (OUD).” – Carol Furlong, LCMHC, MAC, MBA, Elliot Hospital

 

• “When we detail in groups, we focus on small group discussions. One method I use involves flashcards with myths or biases about OUD, and asking two or three of the attendees to discuss that amongst themselves. We have also used a language sheet that guides providers in what to say.” – Elisabeth Fowlie Mock, MD, MPH, Maine Independent Clinical Information Service

 

• “A lot of the older language around OUD identifies with “bad choices” and “bad people”. For example, relapse is associated with a fault of the person. When we are talking about a person with OUD, we are talking about someone with a disease and relapse is a natural course of the disease. When a patient’s blood sugar goes up, we don’t call it a relapse. Just like people with diabetes, we will never cure a person with OUD, but we help them manage [it].” – Don Teater, MD, MPH, Teater Health Solutions

Addressing Stigma through Data and Resources

• “Our team provides statistics that relate to the provider’s specific neighborhoods and specialty, giving them real-time pictures of what’s happening with the patients they see. We know that [cocaine use] is still a difficult topic to bring up, so we help address this with our action kit resources on stigmatic language and counter-top brochures that signal to patients that the provider’s office is a safe place to discuss these issues.” – Carla Foster, MPH, New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene

 

• “Know your patient population: Understand who the patients are, the trauma they’ve faced, and the stigma they may endure. Look at the experiences of your team, the clinicians, and the patients you’re working with and try to understand how these different perspectives all influence one another as you develop your resources.” – Trish Rawn, BScPhm, PharmD, Centre for Effective Practice

Our team at NaRCAD is here to learn and support you as we combat stigma and continue to promote inclusivity. Check out our new Healthcare Inclusivity Toolkit for detailers for additional resources. 

Best,

​The NaRCAD Team

By Anna Morgan-Barsamian, MPH, RN, PMP, Senior Manager, Training & Education, NaRCAD
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Tags: Primary Care, Opioid Safety, Evidence Based Medicine, Harm Reduction

Our team at NaRCAD has been working on an exciting new project developing harm reduction key messages for primary care clinicians in collaboration with the National Association of County and City Health Officials (NACCHO), Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and consultants from Boston Medical Center.
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The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) defines harm reduction as an approach that aims to prevent overdose and infectious disease transmission, improve physical and mental health, and offer options for accessing treatment and other health care services for people who use drugs. Various harm reduction approaches have been proven to prevent overdose and death, injury, infectious disease transmission, and substance misuse. For instance, there is nearly 30 years of research that has shown that syringe services programs decrease transmission of viral hepatitis, HIV, and other infections. 

There are several other harm reduction approaches beyond syringe service programs, including:
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• Peer support
• Naloxone
• Using drugs with another person
• Wound care kits
• Fentanyl strips
• Medications for Opioid Use Disorder (MOUD)
• Referrals for pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP)
• Medication lock boxes
• Safer sex kits to reduce infectious disease transmission

 
It’s critical that academic detailers continue to encourage primary care clinicians to discuss harm reduction with their patients and link them to services within their community. Academic detailers have the ability to empower clinicians to have difficult conversations with patients to reduce infections, overdose, and death. Our team developed the following key messages to support primary care clinicians in caring for patients who would benefit from harm reduction. These key messages are currently being piloted across the United States in a project funded by NACCHO.

Harm Reduction: Key Messages to Improve Outcomes for People Who Use Drugs

1. Assess factors that may contribute to risk of Opioid Use Disorder (OUD) for patients who use opioids.

2. Identify opportunities to reduce risk of harm using a patient-centered approach.

3. Offer Medications for Opioid Use Disorder (MOUD) to patients identified as having OUD.

4. Connect patients with community harm reduction services and other services that meet identified needs.

These evidence-based key messages can help clinicians provide support to their patients and build strong and trusting relationships with those who need it most. Building trust between clinicians and patients allows patients to feel heard and be open to seeking additional treatment, ultimately leading to improved health outcomes.

Our team is looking forward to continuing to explore harm reduction and updating our key messages based on the results of the pilot through NACCHO.

If your program is interested in collaborating with our team on future harm reduction work, or any other clinical topic, please reach out to us at [email protected].
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Want to learn more?
Stay tuned to learn about the results of the pilot and how clinicians responded to these key messages in the field. You can also join our discussion forum to interact with peers who are working on harm reduction!

By Anna Morgan-Barsamian, MPH, RN, PMP, Senior Manager, Training & Education, NaRCAD
 
An interview with Sandeep (Sonny) Singh Bains, PharmD, BCPS, Clinical Educator, Alosa Health. Alosa Health is a national leader in developing and implementing academic detailing programs to improve prescribing.
 
Tags: Detailing Visits, Evidence-Based Medicine, Primary Care, Training

Anna: Hi, Sonny! It’s wonderful to connect with you today and hear about your work as a clinical educator at Alosa Health. What has your clinical pharmacist journey looked like to date?
 
Sonny: I’ve been working for over a decade in hospitals and primary care. I completed my residency in hospital pharmacy, and as I continued to do administrative and clinical work in hospitals, my interests shifted more towards primary care and population health.
 
I’m originally from California where it’s common to have pharmacy involved in primary care. When I moved to Pennsylvania, a lot of clinicians didn’t understand why a pharmacist would be in a primary care setting and were skeptical of me and my role within the clinic.
 
Fast-forward 10 years, and almost every health system in Philadelphia has a pharmacist on their team within their primary care network. I’d like to think that I can take a little bit of credit for paving the way for pharmacists on primary care teams throughout our state!
 
Anna: That’s definitely something to be proud of. How did you end up being a detailer? ​

​Sonny: I’d been noticing a lot of overlap in the work being done in our primary care clinics by different members of the team. I ended up creating protocols to automate certain things for different chronic conditions and people would say, “Wow, this is brilliant.” It really wasn’t brilliant; I was using the same set of guidelines in the literature I was reading and was communicating that to clinicians to make workflows easier. 

​I didn’t know about the strategy of academic detailing at the time, but I knew I needed to educate clinicians. I was fortunate enough to be connected with Alosa Health and I now work for them as a full-time consultant. I work as a detailer and also help hire, interview, train, coach, and mentor new detailers on the team.
 
Anna: You were meant to be a detailer before you even knew what it was! Alosa has been working on diverse clinical topics over the years including, antiplatelets, atrial fibrillation, immunizations for elderly, serious illness conversations, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), heart failure, dementia, atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease (ASCVD) prevention, diabetes, acute pain, chronic pain, and opioid use disorder. What have been some of the campaigns where you’ve felt you’ve made an impact?
 
Sonny: It’s a lot of fun to be working on so many different campaigns. Many of the topics fit right into my wheelhouse with my hospital and primary care background. Diabetes has been my favorite topic. I’ve been able to make a large impact for patients and care providers. We’re able to improve lives of patients (prevention of stroke/heart attacks) and improve outcomes for providers and health systems (financial incentives, quality ratings, etc.).
 
I’m also proud to be part of the pain modules. The opioid epidemic has impacted all of us in America and I’m glad to be able to do my part in helping to bring resources and evidence-based treatment to local providers in our community.

​Anna: It sure sounds like you’ve been able to make an impact! How has your work with Alosa evolved over the years?
 
Sonny: Alosa Health has been expanding and we have several new partnerships and collaborations throughout the United States. We started detailing only in the state of Pennsylvania and we’ve now expanded to numerous states. It’s been exciting to be part of the leadership team to help coach detailers, as well as create creative partnerships with local health systems to improve outcomes for patients. 
 
Anna: What challenges have come up as your program has continued to expand?
 
Sonny: The biggest barrier we’ve experienced, like many detailing programs, has been access to clinicians and the ability to set up visits. I’ve had relationships with clinicians and clinic staff in the past where I could have walked into any office at any given time, but I’ve lost a lot of those relationships with COVID and staff turnover. I’ve been working hard to reestablish relationships in the field and teach new detailers how important strong relationships are to our work as detailers. 

Anna: What approaches have you taken to reestablish relationships, as well as to gain access to new clinics?
 
Sonny: I like to partner with colleagues that I’ve worked with previously. I recently connected with a former colleague who’s a VP at a large healthcare organization and we quickly realized we could help each other improve patient outcomes and reduce cost. From this connection, I was able to get buy-in at the administrative level and accessed hundreds of prescribers. They even gave their clinicians a monetary incentive to meet with our detailers.
 
We’ve also benefited from connecting with administrators of health systems. We approach them like business partners; it takes a special skill to communicate and work with an administrator. It’s important to have team members who understand how to communicate with leadership effectively to get that buy-in.
 
Anna: It might take more time to get buy-in from administrators, but it opens so many doors once it’s done successfully. As we wrap up, can you tell us some tips to help our readers be effective detailers and communicators?
 
Sonny:

• Listen to the clinicians you’re detailing; if you're talking more than 50% of the visit, you're probably talking too much.
• Remember that you’re there as a service for clinicians to improve patient outcomes, so try to frame your visit as what’s in it for them, rather than how many key messages you need to get through.
• Clinicians who believe in your service will invite you back and refer you to colleagues. We all love being in the field and educating clinicians, but we can’t get there without first building strong and trusting relationships.

 
Anna: It’s so important to put the work in to build solid relationships with clinicians in order to be an effective detailer. Thanks for joining us on the DETAILS blog, Sonny - our AD community will gain a lot from the insights you’ve shared today!

Learn more about Alosa’s work: alosahealth.org/clinical-modules

Have thoughts on our DETAILS Blog posts?
You can head on over to our Discussion Forum to continue the conversation!

Biography. Sandeep is a clinical pharmacist with extensive clinical leadership experience in both acute care and ambulatory healthcare settings. He completed post-graduate training at Einstein Medical Center in Philadelphia and has since worked in clinical pharmacy leadership with large healthcare systems in the greater Philadelphia area. He is also the principal consultant at Bains Rx, LLC, a healthcare consulting firm dedicated to improving outcomes while reducing costs.

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By Anna Morgan-Barsamian, MPH, RN, PMP, Senior Manager, Training & Education, NaRCAD

Tags: Detailing Visits, Evidence Based Medicine, Pediatrics, Primary Care

​As we’ve jumped right into 2022 programming, our team at NaRCAD continues to support detailing efforts that improve outcomes for vulnerable populations, recognizing that patient needs are complex and often informed by social determinants of health. One critical topic for which we’ve developed resources focuses on detailing to improve patient health as informed by both adverse and positive childhood experiences. We’re seeing an increased need from our community members to support detailing efforts related to this critical topic. We partnered with the National Association of County and City Health Officials (NACCHO), Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and consultants from Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Tufts Medical Center over the past two years to develop academic detailing materials for clinicians working with both adults and children. 

​The CDC defines adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) as traumatic events that occur in childhood, including abuse, neglect, and family dysfunction. These events are linked to poor health outcomes in adulthood like chronic health problems, mental health conditions, and substance use. When considering the impact of environment on health, the CDC notes that children are likely to flourish when they have safe, nurturing relationships. These supportive settings create the opportunity for positive childhood experiences (PCEs). PCEs can mitigate the effects of ACEs and toxic stress, promote healing from traumatic events, and foster healthy development and learning in children.

Encouraging clinicians to consider both ACEs and PCEs is a natural fit for clinical outreach educators. There are many reasons that clinicians may not be prepared to have conversations with patients about childhood experiences. Perhaps the clinician doesn’t have a behavioral health provider to consult within their practice, so they don’t know who to turn to if a patient discloses a traumatic experience. A detailer can encourage a clinician to explore this concern, as well as provide a list of local behavioral health providers in the community. 

​Another barrier may be that clinicians could feel hesitant to approach discussions related to trauma, or may not have the skills to do so with sensitivity. In this case, detailers can offer tools that illustrate supportive language that creates a safe environment for patients to share their experiences. Supporting clinicians in using evidence-based tools to build trust with their patients signals that it’s not only okay to talk to patients about this sensitive topic; it’s vital for clinicians to lead these conversations in order to ascertain their patients’ needs and promote patient-centered decision making.   

A detailer can encourage clinicians to adopt new behaviors through specific key messages, including asking clinicians to take the following steps to support adult patients:

• Ask patients general questions about trauma such as, “have you had any life experiences that you feel have impacted your health and well-being?”
• Use supportive language with patients who disclose trauma or ACEs to help build resilience such as, “thank you for sharing that with me. Have you talked about this before?”
• Document patient responses and communicate patient-identified strengths to the care team. Avoid documenting the details of the trauma itself and focus on the impact the trauma has had on the patient’s health and well-being.
• Create a plan in collaboration with the patient that encourages self-advocacy.

When clinicians are supporting pediatric patients, detailers can deliver this set of evidence-based key messages, encouraging clinicians to:

• Identify positive experiences and strengths of the patient by asking questions such as, “which adult(s) besides your parents is/are important part(s) of your life?” or “who could you call to help if there was an emergency?”
• Ask about social determinants of health. Understanding how family and community environments impact growth potential helps to improve health outcomes. Questions can address:
  • housing security
  • food security
  • transportation needs
  • utility needs
  • interpersonal safety
  • employment
  • family and community support
  • education
  • mental health
• Use a screening tool to evaluate potential ACEs if indicated. Formal questionnaires provide a structured way to identify adverse and positive childhood experiences, but routine screening for all patients is not currently recommended.
• Evaluate ACE screens based on the child’s current health. If abuse, neglect, or family disruption is going on, there may be an immediate need to intervene. If the child is safe, provide resources to the family and patient.
• Explore collaborative interventions with patients and families. Effective problem-solving of ACE challenges can foster and encourage post-traumatic growth.

With evidence-based tools, successful AD interventions related to ACEs can result in multi-faceted support for patients, such as stronger connections with community resources, mental health supports, and more trusting relationships between clinicians and their patients.
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We hope to continue to explore this important and complex topic together as a community. If your program is currently working on an ACEs or PCEs AD campaign, or is interested in starting one, please reach out to us so we can support the development of your programming. We always love collaborating and learning more about the important work that you’re doing, and we hope to continue to build our resources and create toolkits in support of complex topics such as these that intersect with other behavioral health and prevention-focused AD campaigns.

An interview with Jacki Travers, PharmD, Clinical Academic Detailing Pharmacist, Pharmacy Management Consultants (PMC). PMC operates out of the University of Oklahoma College of Pharmacy and has been providing educational and consultative services for the Oklahoma Medicaid Pharmacy Program for 25 years. PMC began its academic detailing program in 2014 and Jacki was onboarded in 2015 as the first detailer. The academic detailing work is funded primarily by the Health Services Initiative Grant received by Oklahoma Medicaid from the Children's Health Insurance Program. Jacki also serves as an expert training facilitator for the NaRCAD team.

by Anna Morgan, MPH, RN, PMP, NaRCAD Program Manager

Tags: Detailing Visits, Evaluation, ​Primary Care

Anna: Hi Jacki! We can’t wait to hear about your academic detailing work in Oklahoma! Can you tell us a little bit about your program and the clinical topics you detail on?
 
Jacki: Absolutely. Our program is smaller than other AD programs – we have one FTE dedicated to AD and that’s me! Most of our topics are pediatric-focused, based on our funding from the Children’s Health Insurance Program. I've detailed providers on topics including ADHD, appropriate use of atypical antipsychotic medications, treatment of upper respiratory infections, use of psychosocial interventions for mental health needs, implementation of shared decision-making tools, and immunizations. I've ​established a relationship with more than 800 providers and their staff across primary care and specialty care settings in the state of Oklahoma.

​Anna: That's impressive, Jacki. You detail on such unique clinical topics – can you share some challenges related to these topics and how you’ve overcome them?
 
Jacki: We're primarily a rural state, so resources can be hard to access. There's no point in asking a provider to commit to a change and then have them hit this continued wall of unforeseen lack of resources. As a result, I spend a fair bit of my time collecting information that will help providers bridge the implementation gap. I try to connect providers with resources like care management teams, electronic referral platforms, or other providers in their area who are implementing particular services like parent-child interaction therapy, medication therapy management, and applied behavioral analysis. If I'm asking a provider to do something, I want to make sure that they have the tools and the bandwidth to carry it out!
 
Anna: What a great point! You can’t expect a clinician to make changes if they don’t have the resources to do it. Are there additional challenges that have come up in your academic detailing work?
 
Jacki: Most of the challenges I face are the same as those faced by all detailers - access to clinicians, scheduling visits, handling objections, overcoming barriers, gaining commitment to change, and getting access to resources. I overcome these barriers by getting warm handoffs from previously detailed providers, using champions whenever I can, and putting myself in the mind of providers to anticipate what specific resistance there might be so that I can come up with enablers.
 
Sometimes I do a bit of out-of-the-box thinking for the specific challenges and always bring a healthy dose of flexibility. In one case, I dusted off my high school French and used Google translate to ask a French-speaking researcher for permission to modify one of her shared decision-making tools. I could have asked her in English, and it would have been just fine, but I felt like it was going to demonstrate my respect for her work if I did my best to communicate in her preferred language.
 
Whenever possible, I want to try to connect with people in the way that is the most seamless for them. And that's absolutely true for detailing too! I've had providers who want to meet over coffee and muffins at 6:00 AM because it's the only time they have in their day, or providers who need to pump their breast milk during our visit. I roll with it all and make sure I’m meeting providers where they’re at. 

​Anna: Being flexible certainly makes for effective detailing visits. Can you tell us a little more about how you meet providers where they’re at and customize your detailing approach?
 
Jacki: When I’m detailing on one topic, I’m always thinking about future topics by gathering data from providers so that I can better understand their challenges. I ask providers their biggest concerns and I’ve been really surprised at how ready they are to share gaps in resources and information. That’s how our antibiotic topic materials came about. Many providers shared that they often have patients who ask for antibiotic prescriptions and how they have to battle against patient satisfaction surveys that seem to penalize them for not prescribing antibiotics.

The antibiotic detailing materials we created had some scripting to help reduce antibiotic prescribing while also increasing patient satisfaction. The materials included shared decision-making tools with a breakdown of non-antibiotic treatment evidence like humidifiers, honey, saline spray, etc. It's all about identifying why the providers might not be feeling empowered to follow the evidence and then helping them find that empowerment through knowledge, motivation, and resources. 
 
Anna: I love that you continually assess the needs of the providers in your state to inform future work and strengthen relationships. I’m sure with the 800 providers and staff you’ve detailed that you’ve had some success stories– can you share one with us?

Jacki: Of course! I have a great story that shows how important it is to assess needs, really listen, and empathize with clinicians and what they’re going through. I was at a pediatric practice and it had taken me four solid months to get in the door. There had been some pretty strong reluctance even to schedule a visit. Once I did get on the calendar, they canceled and rescheduled multiple times. There was a sense of defensiveness, as though the staff may have been concerned that the visit would be punitive.
 
As I started my needs assessment questions, one of them mentioned that they didn't understand how this topic related to the other meetings they’ve had. I explored that comment a bit more with them and it turned out they had just undergone an extensive audit by the state agency. The whole process left them feeling examined and analyzed.
 
Once I learned about their negative experience, I put their fears to rest, let them know that our time together was completely unrelated to that audit, and that I was there to help them get the best evidence in a digestible format. You could almost see the pressure leaving the room at that point - their body language changed, they were engaged, and they were asking questions and strategizing.
 
By the end of the meeting, the practice manager told me I wouldn’t have any more trouble getting on their calendar. She said, "this was not a waste of my time, and make no mistake, I would tell you if it was!”
 
Anna: That's amazing – what a great story. Before we wrap up, let’s focus on evaluating success. I know you’ve had some remarkable results with your ADHD topic, including a cost savings of more than $226,000 - can you share some of your most recent evaluation data with us?

Jacki: We’re most proud of outcomes from when we worked with providers to reduce the number of unnecessary antibiotic prescriptions, particularly for upper respiratory infections. The providers who were receiving detailing reduced their antibiotic prescribing by more than 17% and they also reduced their use of non-first line agents for upper respiratory infections by more than 16%.
 
However, we wanted to make sure that there weren’t any unintended consequences and that patients weren't having longer or more serious infections when the antibiotics were scaled back. To accomplish this, first, we looked at the prescribing in the previous five years and then one year after the detailing campaign. We identified an oral antibiotic prescription and then looked at the following two weeks after that antibiotic was prescribed to see whether or not there was a hospitalization or an emergency department visit. We found 90% fewer emergency department visits and more than 50% fewer hospitalizations after our detailing campaign. Of the hospitalizations, patients had shortened stays by more than 50%.
 
Even though the patient outcome is, of course, the goal, you can also demonstrate cost savings for your funders and stakeholders. We looked at the dollar amounts for the avoided hospital stays and ER visits and found a total annual cost savings of more than $834,000.

Anna: Wow, that’s impressive! Thank you for taking the time to share your insights and your program’s challenges, successes, and data. You’re an asset to all the communities you detail in and bring so much value to clinicians throughout Oklahoma. We’re also extremely lucky to have you as part of our extended team and larger AD community. We’re looking forward to catching up again soon!
 
Hear more about Jacki’s reflections on the impact of AD here.

Have thoughts on our DETAILS Blog posts?
You can head on over to our Discussion Forum to continue the conversation!

Biography. Jacki joined Pharmacy Management Consultants (PMC) in 2015 and serves as the chair of the academic detailing committee. She has been active in the development and implementation of PMC’s academic detailing program in service to Oklahoma Medicaid providers. Prior to joining PMC, she served in the practice settings of independent, hospital, and clinical pharmacy. She currently develops detailing materials, delivers detailing services, and analyzes program results for multiple topics as part of a statewide plan. Her program efforts focus on bridging the gap between information and application in order to provide quality health care in a fiscally responsible manner.

An interview with Alok Kapoor, MD, MSc a cardiovascular investigator at the University of Massachusetts, Worcester about his work on the SUPPORT-AF II Study. 

​By Mike Fischer, MD, MS, NaRCAD Director and written by Winnie Ho, Program Coordinator.

​Tags: Cardiovascular Health, Data, Detailing Visits, Evaluation, Primary Care

Mike: We’re glad to have you join us to talk about your recent work using AD to improve anticoagulant use in patients with atrial fibrillation (AF). Could we start out by getting an understanding of your work and the goal you had set for your SUPPORT AF II intervention?
 
Alok: I am an internist doing cardiovascular outcomes research, and for the last few years I have been really laser-focused on how to fill the gap in anticoagulation use for patients with AF who have an elevated risk for stroke. These patients tend to be older adults with multiple co-morbidities, which presents certain challenges for primary care providers and cardiology specialists. The goal of our particular AD intervention was to provide evidence and patient case scenarios to show some of the common situations where patients go untreated for stroke prevention despite experts’ suggestions that therapy is warranted.

M: The underuse of anticoagulants is more common than we would like, and the impact of that underuse is substantial. What made you decide to utilize AD as a part of the intervention for your study?
 
A: I was thinking about an intervention that would be more than a simple reminder to providers, and thought that perhaps something more customized that would take into consideration the individual provider’s practice and experience with prescribing anticoagulants made more sense. AD was suggested as a potential strategy by our grant sponsor to address those concerns, so I began to read more into it. The SUPPORT AF II intervention is a combination of the audit and feedback reminders given in our original study, SUPPORT AF I, plus the new offering of AD.

M: How did you anticipate that those different components of the SUPPORT AF I and II interventions would work together? Were there any unanticipated surprises during the implementation?
 
A: I believed that the reminders would encourage providers to reach out to their subspecialty colleagues and also remind them to have discussions about anticoagulation with their patients. Then, AD would allow us to get closer to the underlying belief and resistance factors that might be making it more difficult to prescribe in challenging situations, such as a patient with prior falls, bleeds, or on other medications that can make bleeding more common. Some of these barriers included also unfamiliarity with initiating direct oral anticoagulants and guiding patients to coverage information for the cost of newer anticoagulants.
 
There were some specialists who were not necessarily enthusiastic about receiving messages from us. There were also providers during the course of messaging that indicated that they did not think that these messages were helpful for them, so we adapted. However, most people were appreciative or otherwise silent when receiving messages. The harder work was the convincing needed during the AD visit that could help lead to a more impactful intervention.

M: Yes, an impactful intervention is the goal. In your paper, you talked about the importance of patient choice as a factor in anticoagulant use, and this has been consistent with a few other studies of anticoagulation in AF that highlighted similar challenges. Are there any ways that you’ve thought about to adapt an AD intervention to address the importance of patient choice?
 
A: As part of our AD intervention, we gave prescribers a Jeopardy-type menu where you could choose which themes to explore, and one of those was a shared decision making module with resources including an app designed by my co-collaborator David McManus. This app allowed patients to input their unique conditions and circumstances into our risk stratification algorithm. Knowing the patient risk level, the provider would then be shown questions frequently asked by AF patients that would presumably help the provider address certain concerns during the next patient visit.

M: As you reflect on your experience implementing this intervention, were there themes that especially connected with the primary care providers or cardiology specialists who were receiving AD?
 
A: I was responsible for AD with the primary care physicians while my collaborator worked with cardiology specialists. The providers I spoke with seemed to be really drawn to the evidence in the guidelines and often requested support from me in identifying specific evidence that would be helpful as they developed their own improved management strategy around anticoagulants. I think where we could have added something more robust would be to offer providers a way to deliver these messages to their patients and how to do motivational interviewing with patients who are resistant to start a recommended therapy.  

​M: Support AF II is an impressive piece of work that provides many insights. Do you see other topics in cardiovascular care, or other clinical specialties where it might be useful to do similar studies to test AD to increase the use of evidence-based care?
 
A: There are other types of adherence issues in cardiovascular medicine that are potential targets such as blood pressure management. The issue doesn’t seem to be starting the medication, but in continuing to take it on a daily basis. The AD intervention would be done directly to the providers, but there might be value in also directly approaching the patients.
 
M: It would certainly be interesting to understand whether management issues are based on clinical inertia and hesitation in taking the next step, versus barriers in patient adherence itself. Thank you for taking the time to speak with us today, you’ve given us all a lot to think about!

​Have thoughts on our DETAILS Blog posts?
You can head on over to our Discussion Forum to continue the conversation!

Alok Kapoor, MD, MSc is an investigator who has developed several projects related to anticoagulation and conditions requiring anticoagulation. He is one of the former directors of the medical consultation service at Boston Medical Center. In that role, he routinely educated other providers on the need for anticoagulation versus potential harm, particularly for underserved populations. At the University of Massachusetts, he has established a focus on filling the gap in anticoagulation of patients with atrial fibrillation. This started with SUPPORT-AF, an audit and feedback project funded to give providers a snapshot of their AC prescribing rates relative to their peers and to a national benchmark. In SUPPORT-AF II, he expanded the team's previous efforts to include educational outreach in the form of academic detailing. In his subsequent efforts, he have collaborated with informatics experts to understand the potential for electronic health record-based decision support to fill the gap in AC use.

Jerry Avorn, MD | NaRCAD Co-director

Tags: Detailing Visits, Evidence-Based Medicine, Jerry Avorn, Primary Care

There was a brief shining moment starting in the early 1970s, when I was finishing medical school, that lasted into about the mid-1980s.  Primary care physicians (PCPs) seemed poised to rise above their lowest-in-medicine stature to become recognized for playing a central role in the entire health care system (as, of course, they had been doing all along).  In medical centers throughout the country, growing interest in ‘health maintenance’ and its accompanying insurance designs seemed poised to catapult PCPs from the role of nerds to quarterbacks. 

Then, for reasons we don’t have the space to discuss here, in the following years in many settings, the quarterbacks got recast as gatekeepers, and then as switchboard operators.

​Delivering primary medical care remained as innately vital and sacred a job as ever, but the stature and daily work of the PCP (with the second P now standing for ‘provider’) became degraded in many settings. Morale sank, and PCP burnout and dropout became more common.

What does all this have to do with academic detailing?  A lot. One of the most frequent and visible ways that the quarterback-to-gatekeeper degradation has developed is in the role of clinical decision-making – for medications most often, but also about test ordering, specialist consultations, and many other choices the primary care clinician faces daily. In the Olden Times, which still survive in some pockets of our pathologically heterogeneous coverage system, these decisions are still left in the hands of the PCP, and are still made well or poorly by individuals. 

But increasingly, such choices are driven by formularies, prior authorization requirements, algorithms, and other restrictions. Sometimes these are thoughtful, evidence-based guidances that are useful antidotes to the occasional wild and crazy choices some practitioners occasionally make –  ‘freedom’ which can on occasion lead to potential harm to both patients and health care budgets.

​But sometimes the restrictions are simple-minded, financially-driven, and disrespectful of the needs of specific patients and the nuanced judgment of the individual clinician. That’s where academic detailing comes in. There will always be a place for formulary limitations and restriction of the worst non-evidence-based decisionmaking. But wouldn’t we all rather live in a medical world in which decisions are primarily shaped by the informed decisions of a well-trained health care professional, updated through discussion of the latest data? Especially if that information was provided by another savvy clinician equipped to have a back-and-forth conversation about the basis and the pros and cons of trial findings, guidelines, and observational research?  

​That would help primary care clinicians make better decisions without all the limitations of arbitrary insurance requirements, or computer-based algorithms that sometimes function as if they know Mrs. Johnson better than her doctor does. It could also pave the way for wider adoption of the evidence-based recommendations that the more enlightened policies seek to achieve. And clinicians could again feel more like the health care professionals we spent so many years learning how to be. 

Join us for Dr. Avorn's annual conference talk at #NaRCAD2016: Innovations in Clinical Outreach Education.

by Lyndee Knox, PhD

Tags: Detailing Visits, Practice Facilitation, Primary Care

Practice facilitation is an approach to helping primary care practices improve the quality of care they deliver to patients. Good practice facilitation is practice-centered, meaning that you start where you’re needed and work out from there.  One of my favorite stories about the practice-centered nature of facilitation was told to me by Ann LeFebvre, director of the statewide primary care facilitation program in North Carolina.

Ann was starting work with a new practice in her community. As is common at the beginning of most improvement efforts, she asked the practice what their greatest concern was at the moment. Ann expected them to tell her they were concerned about improving workflow with their electronic health records, or that they wanted to improve their performance on particular HEDIS (Healthcare Effectiveness Data and Information Set) measures, or that they wanted help engaging their patients more effectively. Instead, what they told her caught her completely by surprise.

“We’re really concerned about our patients getting to our practice.”
“Oh,” she said, “so you’re worried about access issues?”
“Well, sort of,” the staff person responded.  “Recently we’ve had a flock of geese take up residence in our parking lot, and they are biting our patients when they get out of their cars to walk inside. Some of our patients are afraid to get out of their cars.”

5 Whys Tool: Click to Learn.
As an experienced facilitator, Ann understood how important it was to meet practices where they are at the current moment, not where they “should be.”  So she rolled-up her sleeves and said, “Ok, let’s figure this one out.”  She saw the problem of the geese as an opportunity to teach practice staff basic principles of quality improvement.  She taught them to use the “5 Whys” to determine why the geese were in the parking lot in the first place, and then to use Plan-Do–Study-Act cycles (PDSA) to design and test solutions to the “goose attack” problem.

Working together, Ann and the practice discovered that a woman living next door to the practice used to keep and feed the geese.  She had recently been hospitalized and because she was no longer there to feed them, the geese had moved into the practice parking lot.   Staff developed a solution: to have another neighbor feed the geese – and tested this solution using a PDSA cycle. The geese left the parking lot, their patients no longer had to deal with hungry and aggressive geese in the practice parking lot, and staff had started to build capacity in quality improvement!
Practice facilitators are specially trained individuals who work with primary care practices “to make meaningful changes and develop the skills they need to adopt new clinical evidence and health service models in their work and to sustain these changes over time.” (Knox & Brach, 2011; DeWalt, et al., 2010). 

The primary aim of facilitators, whether working alone or as part of team, is to build practice capacity for continuous quality improvement, as well as to strengthen practice ability to adapt and implement new evidence-based treatments and health service models.

Facilitation teams develop long-term relationships with practices.  They may work with a practice intensively for 6 to 10 months to implement a specific improvement and then step back for a while.  Even though the active facilitation project has ended, they will check-in with the practice every month or two to monitor progress and maintain relationships until they are needed to support another significant improvement project at the practice.
While facilitation can be provided by a single individual, (a “practice facilitator”) it is often a “team sport.”  The facilitation team is usually led by an individual with expertise in quality improvement processes and methods. This person serves as the team leader and primary point of contact with the practice, and brings in his or her team mates to help the practice as needed.

Other members of the facilitation team include individuals with expertise with health IT who can help practices optimize their health IT systems to support the desired changes; team members with expertise in setting up data systems for monitoring performance; and most recently, patient partners. Academic detailers are also essential members of most facilitation teams.  They possess deep knowledge about clinical topics and provide 1:1 education to clinicians to increase their knowledge about specific preventive care and treatment issues, encouraging those clinicians to change their behavior to improve patient health.

A number of excellent resources are available for training members of facilitation teams, and to guide development of a practice facilitation program. These include the PF Handbook, the National PF Curriculum, and the How to Start and Run a PF Program.   Dr. Mike Fischer, the director of NaRCAD, and a team of experts in PF and practice improvement helped develop them.  These and other resources that can assist you in building a practice facilitation program in your area can be accessed here.

Lyndee Knox, PhD is founding director of LA Net, a primary care practice based research and resource network established with funding from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) in 2002. LA Net supports research and innovation in the healthcare safety net in Los Angeles and provides practice facilitators to practices in its network to support practice-based, clinician and community-led research, evidence translation and practice improvement. Dr. Knox served as principal investigator on AHRQ’s Task Order 13 (TO 13) to examine the use of practice facilitators to implement the Care Model in the safety net, and convened the AHRQ Practice Facilitator Consensus Panel to summarize the state of the field as part of TO13. Most recently she led work for AHRQ to produce a manual to support formation of new practice facilitation programs across the U.S.  The resulting manual, Developing and Running a Primary Care Practice Facilitation Program: A How to Guide  and case studies are available on AHRQ’s website.

As director of LA Net, Lyndee has served as lead on a 2 year contract with the Greater Los Angeles Veterans Administration to create and train a cadre of internal coaches to support its primary care teamlets and PACT transformation. Currently she is working with Mathematica Policy Research to create a 30 module training curriculum for new Practice Facilitators/Coaches for the U.S. AHRQ. Dr. Knox also directs Project ECHO LA, a replication of the successful quality improvement and clinical education intervention from the University of New Mexico aimed at increasing access to specialty care services in rural and underserved areas. Project ECHO LA has been supporting ECHO Knowledge Networks for the LA safety net for 3 years in areas including: psychiatry, preventive care, geriatric medicine and quality improvement.