Validation of the 3-item What Engagement Looks Like (WELL) scale in patients with diabetes

BACKGROUND: Patients’ behaviors play a key role in chronic disease management, but how effective they are may depend on how engaged they feel. The objective was to develop a short measure of how much patients felt engaged in self-managing a chronic condition. Online test of a three-question series followed by a survey of physicians and their eligible diabetic patients. Physicians answered: 1) how well the physician thought the patient was managing his/her diabetes, and 2) how much effort the physician thought the patient was putting in. Each patient was mailed a survey that included three questions on self-management. Six hundred six patients from a national online consumer panel with diabetes or obesity, and 35 physicians from 3 primary care practices and a sample of 243 of their diabetic patients. Respondents were asked three questions about how much they thought their behavior could affect their health condition, how confident they were that they could do what was needed, and how involved they were in decisions about managing their condition. These items were summed to create a WELL score. Descriptive statistics and correlation coefficients were used to describe item relationships. Generalized Estimating Equations were used to predict how well the physician thought the patient was managing their diabetes and patient effort. RESULTS: Correlations among the three patient-reported items ranged from − 0.01 to 0.45. The WELL score was correlated with an existing measure of patient activation commitment (r = .43, p < 0.001) and found to be a significant predictor of physicians’ ratings of how much effort patients devoted to condition management (b = 0.02, p = 0.001, OR = 1.02) after adjusting for confounders. The WELL score didn’t predict physicians’ ratings of how effective patients were (b = 0.003, p = .526, OR = 1.004) after their A1c score had been taken into account. CONCLUSION: Patients’ WELL scores predicted physicians’ ratings of patient effort in diabetes self-management.