Consumer input into health care: Time for a new active and comprehensive model of consumer involvement

BACKGROUND: To ensure the provision of patient‐centred health care, it is essential that consumers are actively involved in the process of determining and implementing health‐care quality improvements. However, common strategies used to involve consumers in quality improvements, such as consumer membership on committees and collection of patient feedback via surveys, are ineffective and have a number of limitations, including: limited representativeness; tokenism; a lack of reliable and valid patient feedback data; infrequent assessment of patient feedback; delays in acquiring feedback; and how collected feedback is used to drive health‐care improvements. OBJECTIVES: We propose a new active model of consumer engagement that aims to overcome these limitations. This model involves the following: (i) the development of a new measure of consumer perceptions; (ii) low cost and frequent electronic data collection of patient views of quality improvements; (iii) efficient feedback to the health‐care decision makers; and (iv) active involvement of consumers that fosters power to influence health system changes.