Regional needs assessment for emergency physician audit and feedback

Area of Science:

• Healthcare quality improvement
• Physician performance metrics
• Clinical practice evaluation

Background:

• Audit and feedback is a common strategy for enhancing physician performance.
• Current metrics are often driven by regulatory requirements rather than clinical utility.
• A needs assessment was conducted to identify clinician-preferred audit and feedback metrics.

Purpose of the Study:

• To assess the usefulness of audit and feedback metrics for clinicians.
• To understand physician readiness for audit and feedback initiatives.
• To explore preferences for data confidentiality in performance evaluations.

Main Methods:

• A web-based survey was distributed to 104 emergency medicine physicians across five clinical practice sites.
• Physicians ranked 49 clinical practice metrics and reported on their readiness for audit and feedback.
• Data on training duration, gender, and practice setting (academic vs. community) were collected for comparative analysis.

Main Results:

• A high level of readiness for audit and feedback was observed among participating physicians.
• The most highly ranked metrics were emergency department return rates and peer assessments of collegiality and care quality.
• Significant differences in metric preference were noted between genders and between academic and community practitioners.

Conclusions:

• This study is the first regional analysis of physician preferences for audit and feedback.
• Physicians are receptive to audit and feedback, supporting the development of regional structures.
• Findings provide a roadmap for regional change management and the implementation of effective performance improvement tools.