The eHealth Strategy Office was invited last month to participate at the very first “Academic Detailing Exchange” hosted by the National Resource Center for Academic Detailing (NaRCAD), based out of Harvard Medical School.
On November 18, 2011, eHealth Strategy Office’s very own Dr. Helen Novak Lauscher and Dr. Terryn Naumann with the Pharmaceutical Services Division of the Ministry of Health presented “The Role of New Technologies in Academic Detailing”, an overview of the BC Provincial Academic Detailing (PAD) Service and Technology Enabled Academic Detailing (TEAD).
The interactive session was delievered via webconferencing, bringing together a range of practitioners, academic detailers, researchers and educators. The presentation included a brief history and background of PAD and TEAD, findings and lessons learned through the course of implementation so far, and processes for monitoring and evaluation of the service to collect feedback from both academic detailers and prescribers who use the service.
Also participating at this meeting were experts and professionals from a spectrum of health service and academic organizations engaged in academic detailing delivery and research. According to Helen, “It was a great opportunity to meet virtually with academic detailing experts from different contexts and learn how good practices can be transferable from one setting to another.” NaRCAD’s exchange series is an excellent venue for knowledge sharing and initiating a community of practice. And from a technology standpoint, she enjoyed using web-conferencing to connect in a way that wouldn’t be possible without it.
The interest in and ideas for enabling academic detailers with new information-communication technologies are extremely useful for PAD’s implementation in BC.