Increasingly, managed care organisations are trying to decide how to get physicians to rationalise their prescribing practices. In this environment, there could be a real role for academic detailing as a means of ensuring independent, cost-effective and safe prescribing, claimed Dr Jerry Avorn from Harvard Medical School in Boston, US, a pioneer in this field. Academic detailing involves exploiting the strengths of the drug industry sales model, using pharmacists to deliver independent advice on prescribing.1At the 11th International Conference on Pharmacoepidemiology [Montréal, Canada; August 1995], Dr Avorn and 2 other researchers from the UK and Australia presented models of academic detailing for 3 different healthcare systems.