Changing prescribing behaviour throug...( Colin Dormuth and colleagues present re...),Health

While a systematic review in The Cochrane Library concluded that printed education materials for health care professionals had negligible impact, the authors point out that effect of regular and expected printed educational materials on physician prescribing behaviour has not been studied. The study by Dormuth and colleagues determined that, while no single letter made a statistically significant difference, the overall impact of 12 letters made a big difference.

In their study of 499 physicians from 24 local health areas in British Columbia , physicians in the control group (n=241) received letters 3-8 months after physicians in the intervention group (n=258). The authors found that the probability of prescribing a drug recommended in a letter rather than another drug in the same class increased by 30% in the 3 months after that letter was mailed relative to the preceding 3 months.

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Contact: Colin Dormouth
cdormuth@hsph.harvard.edu
Canadian Medical Association Journal
25-Oct-2004