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. 2023 Feb 16;25:e40685. doi: 10.2196/40685

Table 2.

Illustrative quotes on the potential benefits of the reflective practice data tools.

Theme Quote
Peer comparison …I think it’s vitally important and it’s one of the things we try and do [...] and not only individuals, but also as groups or departments to highlight areas where there could be room for improvement. For example, we can look at length of stay for individual doctors versus the average. We can look at pressure areas, with falls. It’s really a very important and useful tool. [P12, Clinician, Australia]
…The problem with sending data to individuals, it’s only useful if you send them the comparisons, because otherwise you might think you’re doing fine. But if you don’t know where you sit against your peers locally and your peers nationally, you don’t know how it is. [P13, Clinician, Australia/United Kingdom]
Reflective group discussions …Things like length of stay, hospital acquired complications, and 28-day readmissions generate sufficient patients of interest to make a very robust discussion. So those 3 indicators really don’t say much about the outcome for the specialist on their own. But they highlight patients that are worth discussing as a craft (specialty) group. [P17, Clinical informatician, Australia]
Practice change …If I’m trying to drive some sort of change through a specialty, we might pick out some data of interest and then show them what the data is now, and then decide together on a project - that we might be working on some sort of quality improvement project. Then track the same data over time. [...] So that’s another way we use data. [P03, Chief Medical Officer, Australia]
…I think what happens is that we see that data becomes a nice to have, not that data becomes the thing that drives the change or drives the practice. I think really that the pendulum is still swinging and we need it to swing to the stage where data is the key thing behind driving all things, the decisions that we make, whether that be financial, patient flow, even clinical. [P15, Informatician/Clinician, Australia]