Ask the expert: How often should the medical staff provide physicians with feedback?

Because hospital quality programs traditionally focus on negative feedback, physicians don’t look forward to receiving feedback more often than absolutely necessary. Your organization will undermine its efforts to create a culture of continuous improvement if it provides infrequent feedback that highlights only negative aspects of a physician’s performance. To promote a culture of continuous improvement, physicians should expect regular, periodic feedback. This feedback should include appreciation for what the physician is doing well and should identify opportunities for improvement.

The frequency of this feedback varies depending on the data. For example, determining how often to provide aggregated, rate-based data (such as patient satisfaction rates or patient complaint rates) depends on whether the data change is based significantly on the physician’s patient volume.
The bottom line is that your organization should provide feedback to physicians more frequently than every two years if it wants to make feedback, appreciation, and self-improvement part of its physician culture. Your best bet is to provide performance feedback culled from inpatient data to physicians either quarterly or every six months.

This week’s question and answer are from A Practical Guide to Managing Disruptive and Impaired Physicians by R. Dean White, DDS, MS; and Jonathan H. Burroughs, MD, MBA, FACPE, CMSL.