Challenges in Working Towards Patient Engagement in Developing Technology Prototypes
For researchers and designers of digital health interventions for complex chronic care, the paper provides practical lessons on patient engagement, but the findings are preliminary and based on a small pilot.
The paper reports on patient engagement challenges during a two-month pilot of MyCareCompass, a digital health intervention for people with multiple chronic conditions, and distills three implementation lessons for designing for engagement in complex chronic care.
Creating supportive technologies for people living with multiple chronic conditions is extremely challenging. These patients are often faced with substantial visible and invisible treatment work as well as their everyday responsibilities, including coordinating across providers, tracking information, and repeating communication in emotionally charged contexts. In the Cumulative Complexity Model (CuCoM), the balance between patient workload and patient capacity shapes what patients can realistically take on, including whether a digital tool can be adopted and sustained. In this paper, we report engagement lessons from implementing MyCareCompass, a patient-facing digital health intervention (DHI) intended to support day-to-day self-management for people living with multiple chronic conditions. We define engagement as patient uptake and sustained use during a two-month pilot study of our platform, drawing on usage analytics and follow-up feedback, and distill three implementation lessons for designing for engagement in complex chronic care.