In a 2009 presentation to trustees, the rowing association detailed outreach efforts that included local high schools, the city's parks department and groups like Big Brothers Big Sisters.
Academic detailing (educational outreach, educational visiting) by trained detailers is the key intervention [ 17].
We validated the information provided by the ORWs through structured interviews with peer educators and ORWs responsible for the cluster and detailed reviews of organizational documents such as meeting minutes, micro-planning documents detailing monthly outreach contacts, organizational by-laws, and annual reports.
Academic detailing or educational outreach is a form of continuing medical education (CME) in which a trained health professional such as a physician or pharmacist visits physicians in their offices to provide evidence-based information.
Academic detailing involves educational outreach visits and incorporates external audit and supervision, and has a larger effect on prescribing than dissemination of educational materials, audit or feedback alone [ 6, 7].
Academic detailing and pharmacist outreach visits are interventions of proven efficacy to make independent and evidence-based information available to physicians; this approach and its feasibility have not yet been tested on a large scale and, moreover, they have never been formally tested in Italy.
Two clinics were allocated to receive face-to-face detailing and two received outreach through video conferencing or asynchronous web-based outreach.
More interactive strategies such as academic detailing, also called educational outreach, have been shown to be an effective way of influencing prescribing behaviour [ 13].
Professional outreach and detailing to a wide variety of care providers, including those in the healthcare, educational and judicial sectors, will facilitate rapid redirection of appropriate patients to STEP.
Therefore we decided to use outreach visits ("academic detailing") prior to considering specific barriers.
