Audit & Feedback Laboratories
What is an Audit & Feedback Laboratory?
An Implementation Laboratory is a research team integrated into healthcare systems undertaking program(s) of research directly relevant to healthcare systems’ priorities (Ivers & Grimshaw 2016)
- We are looking at audit & feedback, so are referring to these as Audit & Feedback (A&F) Laboratories
How can Audit & Feedback Laboratories Help?
A&F Laboratories are helpful because they (Ivers & Grimshaw 2016):
- Reduce problems relating to convening de novo research teams, seeking project by project funding, negotiating access with healthcare systems, conducting study, writing up results (usually out of funding period)
- Provide opportunities for formal and informal linkages of mutual advantage to the research team and healthcare system
- Allow teams to test comparative effectiveness of implementation interventions at scale
- Testing intervention design, and delivery will allow for future optimization
Testing comparative effectiveness of different ways of delivering audit and feedback needs large sample sizes that are unlikely to be realized in one-off research projects
- Collaborating with health system partners can help address this problem
Delivering large scale audit and feedback programs within healthcare systems benefits all participants
- Benefits for health system-learning organization, demonstrable improvements in its quality improvement activities, linkages to academic experts
- Benefits for implementation science – ability to test important (but potentially subtle) variations in audit and feedback that may be important effect modifiers
- I.e. What works better in A&F, and why?
