Can Academic Detailing Move the Needle for Patients with Diabetes in a State-Based Prescription Drug Benefit Program?

Background: Publicly funded prescription drug programs, such as state pharmacy assistance programs, provide critical benefits for the care of individuals, but they are frequently limited in their resources to optimize patient outcomes. The application of quality metrics to prescription drug claims may help to determine whether prescribers' adherence to national standards can be augmented through academic detailing.

Objective: To evaluate changes in diabetes drug prescribing patterns after an academic detailing educational intervention in 2013 and 2014 for prescribers in the Pennsylvania Pharmaceutical Assistance Contract for the Elderly (PACE) program.

Methods: We used a retrospective, quasiexperimental study design that applied interrupted time series and segmented regression analysis, and examined PACE pharmacy claims data for 1 year before and 1 year after the academic detailing intervention. Four diabetes prescribing metrics were evaluated at monthly intervals for a sample of 574 prescribers who received academic detailing and for a propensity score-matched comparison sample of 574 prescribers who did not receive the intervention.

Results: The prescribers who received academic detailing did not differ significantly after the intervention from the providers who did not receive the intervention in their prescribing trends for the 4 diabetes metrics. The observed time series patterns suggest that diabetes-related ceiling effects were likely, with relatively small room for improvement at the group level during the study period.

Conclusion: The results of this study did not demonstrate group differences in prescribing trends that were attributable to the intervention. However, many prescribers in the detailed group had been exposed to similar educational outreach by PACE before 2013, which limits the interpretation of this finding. In addition, the diabetes quality metrics had been the standard of care during the preceding decade, with a broad dissemination of the treatment guidelines to the provider community. These results are consistent with a ceiling effect in the measured metrics, suggesting that most prescribers in both groups were largely following core diabetes guidelines before and after the intervention.