Using Electronic Health Records Data to Identify Strong Performers in Healthcare Quality Improvement

Assessing for positive deviance is one method of identifying individuals, teams, or organizations that perform substantially better than their peers. This approach has been used to support quality-of-care improvement processes in healthcare settings by identifying healthcare team members who perform comparatively well within a given environment and sharing their opinions, actions, and practices with others. This case study presents an adaptable, straightforward framework for identifying positive deviance, or strong performers, within the healthcare setting and is intended for any primary care health system tracking quality measures and aiming to understand the performance of their providers, clinic sites, or organization. Moreover, this protocol does not require the use of more time-consuming methods, such as interviews, and is instead based on repurposing data already being documented in the electronic health record.