Inclusion criteria | Typical exclusion examples |
---|---|
Population | |
The intervention primarily targeted health professionals (including clinicians and non-clinicians e.g. managers) [8]. | Interventions intended to help patients choose health care provider or treatment (e.g. [124]). |
Intervention | |
The intervention provided feedback to participants [8]. | Audit reports (e.g. [125]); pay-for-performance programmes where feedback was not explicitly provided (e.g. [126]). |
Feedback primarily concerned health professionals’ performance in clinical settings, defined as compliance with pre-defined clinical standards (e.g. clinical guidelines) and/or achievement of clinical patient outcomes [8]. This may have referred to the performance of an individual, their team, or organisation [8]. | Interventions that provided only fictitious feedback (e.g. [127]), feedback used in training or simulated settings (e.g. [128]), feedback on non-clinical aspects of performance, or data not directly related to clinical performance, such as costs of care (e.g. [129]), patient experience (e.g. [130]), or epidemiological surveillance (e.g. [131]). |
Clinical performance data were primarily measured from medical records, computerised databases, or observations from patients [2, 132]. | Feedback based only on peer or supervisor observation (e.g. [133]). |
Feedback related to care provided to defined populations of patients [2, 8, 134]. | Feedback solely on the care of individual patients, such as reminder or alert systems (e.g. [135]), patient-level summaries (e.g. [136]), significant event analyses, or case reviews (e.g. [137]). |
Feedback could inform quality improvement actions for teams or organisations, not solely individual patients [2, 134]. | Dashboards that summarised patients’ current clinical status to primarily inform point-of care decisions (e.g. [138]). |
Feedback was a core and essential component of the intervention i.e. in multifaceted interventions was unlikely other components would have been offered in the absence of feedback [8, 132]. | Improvement collaboratives that primarily consisted of mentoring visits, improvement advisors, and educational sessions, with “benchmarking” as an additional component (e.g. [139]). |
Comparator | |
Not applicable | Not applicable |
Outcome | |
The intervention primarily aimed to improve clinical performance (as defined) [8]. | Interventions that primarily intended to reduce costs (e.g. [129]). |
Study | |
Studies of specific interventions described in enough detail to determine whether they met the above criteria. | Studies of groups or collections of interventions, the characteristics of which are not clearly described. For example, studies of “feedback interventions” in general (e.g. [140]). |
Evaluations of feedback interventions that reported both qualitative data collection (e.g. semi-structured interviews, focus groups, unstructured observations) and analysis methods (e.g. grounded theory, thematic analysis, framework analysis) [141]. They must have provided either a full methodological description or reference to a specific relevant approach [141]. Studies could seek to answer any research question about the feedback intervention. | Studies reporting interviews or focus groups but no description of analytic methods (e.g. [142]), intervention descriptions or protocol papers (e.g. [143]), editorials or opinion papers (e.g. [144]), quantitative surveys with or without open ended questions (e.g. [145]), or manuscripts with insufficient detail to judge adequacy, such as abstracts or letters (e.g. [146]). |
Peer-reviewed publications in scholarly journals written in English. | Books, grey literature, theses (e.g. [147]). |