Academic detailing takes the effective outreach
strategies of pharmaceutical marketing and applies
them to the service of promoting unbiased,
noncommercial reviews of the totality of the
existing evidence on a particular clinical topic,
along with practice recommendations based on
that evidence. It does this by first developing
impartial syntheses of the best evidence for
practice in a given clinical area, formulated by
university-based experts and transformed into
specific, clinically relevant recommendations.
These recommendations are then delivered
directly to clinicians by trained educators—
generally nurses, pharmacists, or physicians—in
interactive encounters in the practitioner’s own
office