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Ontario opioid academic detailing (Centre for Effective Practice) and MyPractice opioid reports

Two provincially funded programs for Ontario family physicians that started around 2018: the Centre for Effective Practice's academic detailing service, with up to three visits on long-term opioid therapy, starting opioids and problematic use; and Health Quality Ontario's confidential MyPractice: Primary Care audit-and-feedback reports showing each physician's opioid prescribing against peers.

Years
2018–now
Country
Canada
Topic
Opioids
Asks people to
Stop
Strategy
Social normsTrusted messenger
Channel
Clinical settingDirect mail
Audience
Clinicians
Family physicians in Ontario.

Evidence

Quasi-experimentalNo effect

Matched cohort of family physicians (Lacroix 2024): prescribing was already falling and neither academic detailing nor audit-and-feedback added a significant overall effect; audit-and-feedback helped the highest prescribers. A mixed-methods process evaluation (Kithulegoda 2023, CMAJ Open) describes how physicians used the visits.

Sponsor (who paid)

  • Government of Ontario (Ministry of Health) Foreign government, funder
  • Centre for Effective Practice NGO, academic detailing service
  • Health Quality Ontario (now Ontario Health) Foreign government, MyPractice audit-and-feedback reports

Credits (who made it)

Not recorded yet.

Related campaigns

Sources

  1. Lacroix M, Abdelmalek F, Everett K et al. Effectiveness of Audit and Feedback and Academic Detailing Interventions to Support Safer Opioid Prescribing in Primary Care. Am J Med evaluation · 2024 · DOI 10.1016/j.amjmed.2024.09.017 · PMID 39413866
  2. Kithulegoda N et al. Academic detailing to improve appropriate opioid prescribing: a mixed-methods process evaluation. CMAJ Open 11(5):E932 evaluation · 2023

Research notes

Clinician-facing program. Discovered 2026-10-22 (clinician-campaigns pass). CMAJ Open page fetched 2026-10-22 (authors include Centre for Effective Practice staff). The 2018 launch, three topics, provincial funding and MyPractice reach (3,000+ physicians) come from search snippets (odprn.ca returned 403; the hqontario MyPractice blog URL is now 404). Verify before citing.

Record cases/ontario-opioid-academic-detailing-and-feedback.json, updated 2026-10-22· Link to this campaign