Exploring Anesthesia Provider Preferences for Precision Feedback: Preference Elicitation Study

TL;DR

This study explores how anesthesia providers prefer to receive personalized feedback to improve their performance, finding that individual preferences vary but are consistent within individuals.

Contribution

The study introduces a method for eliciting anesthesia providers' preferences for precision feedback and demonstrates the feasibility of tailoring feedback to individual needs.

Findings

Participants showed diverse but internally consistent preferences for feedback characteristics like temporality and display format.

Preferred messages received high perceived benefit ratings (mean 4.27 on a 5-point scale).

A one-size-fits-all approach to feedback delivery is unlikely to meet individual preferences.

Abstract

Health care professionals must learn continuously as a core part of their work. As the rate of knowledge production in biomedicine increases, better support for health care professionals’ continuous learning is needed. In health systems, feedback is pervasive and is widely considered to be essential for learning that drives improvement. Clinical quality dashboards are one widely deployed approach to delivering feedback, but engagement with these systems is commonly low, reflecting a limited understanding of how to improve the effectiveness of feedback about health care. When coaches and facilitators deliver feedback for improving performance, they aim to be responsive to the recipient’s motivations, information needs, and preferences. However, such functionality is largely missing from dashboards and feedback reports. Precision feedback is the delivery of high-value, motivating performance information that is prioritized based on its motivational potential for a specific recipient, including their needs and preferences. Anesthesia care offers a clinical domain with high-quality performance data and an abundance of evidence-based quality metrics.

The objective of this study is to explore anesthesia provider preferences for precision feedback.

We developed a test set of precision feedback messages with balanced characteristics across 4 performance scenarios. We created an experimental design to expose participants to contrasting message versions. We recruited anesthesia providers and elicited their preferences through analysis of the content of preferred messages. Participants additionally rated their perceived benefit of preferred messages to clinical practice on a 5-point Likert scale.

We elicited preferences and feedback message benefit ratings from 35 participants. Preferences were diverse across participants but largely consistent within participants. Participants’ preferences were consistent for message temporality (α=.85) and display format (α=.80). Ratings of participants’ perceived benefit to clinical practice of preferred messages were high (mean rating 4.27, SD 0.77).

Health care professionals exhibited diverse yet internally consistent preferences for precision feedback across a set of performance scenarios, while also giving messages high ratings of perceived benefit. A “one-size-fits-most approach” to performance feedback delivery would not appear to satisfy these preferences. Precision feedback systems may hold potential to improve support for health care professionals’ continuous learning by accommodating feedback preferences.

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