Audit and feedback is one of the most effective ways to support practice change in health care and improve patient care, but it doesn’t always work perfectly. To understand how audit and feedback is most likely to succeed, an international team of researchers examined nearly 300 randomized practice change trials of the technique. Their results, published in the Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, show that it is important to target individuals with personalized metrics as opposed to targeting a whole team, and to choose metrics that have substantial room for improvement. They also show that it is helpful to engage respected peers, incorporate multiple methods of providing feedback and benchmark against top performers. If you have questions about designing audit and feedback studies, you can reach out to experts at OHRI’s Ottawa Methods Centre (also part of the Centre for Implementation Research) for support. Several current and former members of OHRI contributed to the systematic review, including Noah Ivers, Sharlini Yogasingam, Jacob Crawshaw, Guillaume Fontaine, Stefanie Linklater, Maryam Shah, Justin Presseau and Jeremy Grimshaw.