Strategies for changing clinicians' practice patterns - A new perspective

How can we persuade clinicians to adopt proven practices? Education, incent ives, feedback, social marketing, and various other change strategies have inconsistent and unpredictable effects. We propose a theoretical framework that can provide a reliable basis for selecting effective change strategies . We divide clinicians into 4 categories on the basis of their responses to new information about the effectiveness of clinical strategies. We similar ly divide the universe of practice change strategies into knowledge-oriente d and behavior-oriented methods. We then show why specific combinations of these strategies are likely to be consistently effective for each of the 4 categories of clinicians.