• Dorothea Hempel, Emanuele Pivetta, and Heidi H Kimberly.
• Harvard Affiliated Emergency Medicine Residency, Department of Emergency Medicine, Brigham and Women's Hospital/Massachusetts General Hospital, 75 Francis St, Boston, MA 02115, USA. hkimberly@partners.org.
• Crit Ultrasound J. 2014 Jan 1; 6 (1): 1.

BackgroundClinician-performed ultrasound has become a widely utilized tool in emergency medicine and is a mandatory component of the residency curricula. We aimed to assess the effect of personalized peer-comparison feedback on the number of ultrasound scans performed by emergency medicine residents.FindingsA personalized peer-comparison feedback was performed by sending 44 emergency medicine residents a document including personally identified scan numbers and class averages. The number of ultrasound scans per clinical shift for a 3-month period before and after the feedback intervention was calculated. The average number of ultrasound exams per shift improved from 0.39 scans/shift before to 0.61 scans/shift after feedback (p = 0.04). Among the second year residents, the scans/shift ratio improved from 0.35 to 0.87 (p = 0.07); for third year residents, from 0.51 to 0.58 (p = 0.46); and from 0.33 to 0.41 (p = 0.21) for the fourth year residents before and after the intervention, respectively.ConclusionsA personalized peer-comparison feedback provided to emergency medicine residents resulted in increased ultrasound scan numbers per clinical shift. Incorporating this method of feedback may help encourage residents to scan more frequently.

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