Introduction

Health systems worldwide are focused on improving patient and population healthcare outcomes. Data are increasingly leveraged to support these aims, including clinical performance feedback (CPF) initiatives that provide clinicians with data on how often their patients are receiving evidence-based care compared with a specific improvement goal, which may reflect a standardised target or how they perform in comparison to their peers.1 2 Unfortunately, engagement with and impact of providing data is variable. We need to tailor data to the nature of its clinician recipients in the same way we tailor the nature of care to the individual patient. This will require continued investment in producing and analysing data and a better understanding of the clinicians whose behaviours we are trying to optimise. CPF initiatives that truly help clinicians achieve their goals in this regard are more likely to be well received. Imagine a future in which CPF is tailored for clinicians in the same way that Amazon, Google and Netflix personalise interfaces, informed by a range of data points and usability heuristics.

CPF initiatives focus their efforts on telling clinicians what the outcome should be instead of better understanding them as recipeients and the resources or skills they need to improve those outcomes. It should not be surprising then that upwards of one-third of clinicians who sign up to receive voluntary CPF do not engage with it.3 In order to effectively tailor CPF we need to couple ongoing investments in producing and analysing routinely collected data with insights about the people whose attention we are trying to capture and whose clinical behaviours we are trying to optimise. Such insights would form the foundation for tailoring our strategies that seek to improve quality of care.

The continued implementation of CPF initiatives with a one-size-fits-all mentality is a design flaw …