Empowering Patient Engagement in Digital Health
Working towards enhancing health outcomes and impact through active patient involvement in digital health.
đź”” Shape the Future of Digital Health!
Help create the PE Digital Roadmap to integrate patient engagement in digital solutions. Click to learn more here!
Navigating the Complex Digital Health Landscape
Digital health is transforming healthcare with innovations like heart-monitoring smartwatches and preventative care apps, empowering people to take control of their health. However, the field remains fragmented, often neglecting the essential role of patient engagement (PE).
The complexity and lack of unified leadership among stakeholders create challenges in fully realizing PE’s potential, making meaningful collaboration and improved health outcomes difficult to achieve.
The aim is to bring the relevant stakeholders together to understand, define, and align on patient engagement best practices, ultimately building a community of early adopters of PE standards in the digital health space.
Transforming Patient Care:
How a community of experts is working towards enhancing engagement and outcomes through digital health
Clarifying Patient Roles in Digital Health Design
The development of the PE Roadmap in Digital Health is underway, guided by our collaborative community of experts, to understand how patient engagement should be integrated into the design and development of digital health solutions. This step-by-step framework outlines the ‘when, why, and how’ of effective patient involvement, enhancing implementation, acceptance, and compliance and ultimately leading to better health outcomes.
This roadmap, co-created with insights from PFMD, EUPATI, and PEOF and grounded in methodologies like Patient Engagement Quality Guidance, Design Thinking, and The Lean Startup, provides a comprehensive guide to implementing meaningful patient engagement. This framework demonstrates how to effectively involve patients in digital health solutions to maximize value and impact.
We invite you to participate in our public consultation and contribute to the development of this roadmap. Your input is invaluable, whether you want to provide feedback or share case studies on co-design.
Advocating for Meaningful Patient Engagement in Digital Health
A diverse group of leading experts on the topic—Veronica Popa, Jan Geissler, Rebecca Vermeulen, Elizabeth Priest, Katherine Capperella, Gözde Susuzlu, Sharon F. Terry, and Nicholas Brooke—explored the transformative potential of patient engagement in digital health through extensive research and in-depth discussions at the Patient Engagement Open Forum (PEOF). These sessions, both virtual and in-person, brought together stakeholders to co-create strategies emphasizing early and continuous patient involvement.
The collective insights are detailed in the publication “Delivering Digital Health Solutions that Patients Need: A Call to Action,” which advocates for a unified, multistakeholder approach to elevate digital health technologies and ensure they meet real patient needs, foster trust, and improve health outcomes.
Digital Health is a catch-all term
The patient's point of view is still underrepresented
Meaningful PE is not happening enough - multi-stakeholder guidance is needed
Our current system doesn’t support meaningful PE
COMING SOON!
Encouraging Patient Involvement in Digital Development and Data
The rationale for the Stakeholder Expectations Matrix emerged from several PEOF sessions and 1:1 conversations with digital health champions. While analyzing their input, PFMD realized stakeholders hold different views on digital health, how health data should be managed, and how they expect to overcome the various barriers.
To further test the expectations of different stakeholders across the digital health landscape, project contributors conducted 37 interviews (encompassing a wide range of job roles, functions, and geographies) on how aligned stakeholders are in digital health, identify focus areas for a multistakeholder approach, and addressed the need for unified leadership.
This has led to the Stakeholder Expectations Matrix, which identifies four main challenges:
What’s Next
Together with our community, we will continue to drive patient-centered innovation in digital health by:
Leading the shift towards co-design in digital health:
The project will continue to support the integration of the patient perspective in the design, development, and implementation of digital health solutions with the PE Roadmap in digital health.
Building strategic partnerships to support patient-centric approaches:
Working with key actors to ensure they integrate patients’ and patient groups’ perspectives in regulatory efforts as healthcare technology continues to evolve and innovate.
Continue looking at the Digital Health landscape to dissect new challenges and uncover opportunities.
More specifically, explore the potential of AI to innovate in healthcare and foster PE practices to empower the patient community to use these new emerging technologies while addressing ethical concerns, mistrust, and responsible use.
Explore More Resources
Stakeholder Expectation Matrix