Our Terms of Engagement

Maybe it’s just me, but I find that staying informed of current research practice often feels like I’m trying to take a sip of water from a fire hose. Journal articles only scratch the surface, with vast more treasures lying in wait through social media postings.

As I looked through engagement posts this week, though, it occurred to me that it may be time to consider our use of the term patient engagement. I’m trying to find new projects that engage patients as partners, but what I’m sifting through is a lot of noise - companies, medical practices, and healthcare systems adopting a trendy term to flog an app or a software program that claims to increase engagement in a decidedly customer-focused model of healthcare.

To make it easier to stay current, then, I’ve made it a regular activity to scour key terms on Twitter, like “knowledge translation”, “share your science”, and “patient engagement”. Admittedly, it’s here where content feels like a firehose, so hashtags and key terms are helpful in narrowing the search.

What is always curious about these “patient engagement” products or approaches is that the direction of engagement - of communication - flows one way: from researcher to patient. Further, the term seems to place the emphasis for change on those who are already changed, by nature of their quality of life being impacted by something that is often summarized in another’s chart note or billable visit.

Perhaps our focus, then, should be less on engaging people who are already engaged, and more on teaching those who hold the door to richer opportunity on how to be more engaged, and in such a way that it changes the system from within and ultimately makes them better partners for their patients? To start, a shift from #PatientEngagement to #ResearcherEngagement may help re-emphasize efforts.