Assessing Patient Engagement in Health Care: Proposal for a Modeling and Simulation Framework for Behavioral Analysis

Human behavior plays a vital role in health care effectiveness and system performance. Therefore, it is necessary to look carefully at the interactions within a system and how a system is affected by the behavioral responses and activities of its various components, particularly human components and actions. Modeling patients’ engagement behaviors can be valuable in many ways; for example, models can evaluate the effects of therapeutic interventions on health improvement, health care effectiveness, and desired outcomes of changing health lifestyles. Modeling and simulation (M&S) help us to understand the interactions within a whole system under defined conditions. M&S in patient behavior analysis involve models that attempt to identify certain human behaviors that most likely have an impact on health care operations and services. Our study’s overall aims are (1) to investigate the impacts of patients’ engagement and various human behavior patterns on health care effectiveness and the achievement of desired outcomes and (2) to construct and validate a framework for modeling patient engagement and implementing and supporting patient management best practices, health policy-making processes, and innovative interventions in health care. We intend to extract routinely collected data of different parameters from general patients diagnosed with chronic diseases, such as diabetes. Our plan is to design data sets and extract health data from a pool of >4 million patient records from different general practices in England. We will focus on the primary electronic medical records of patients with at least 1 chronic disease (>200,000 records). Simulation techniques will be used to study patient engagement and its impact on health care effectiveness and outcome measures. The study will integrate available approaches to develop a framework for modeling how patients’ behaviors affect health care activities and outcomes and to underline the characteristics and salient factors that operational management needs to be aware of when developing a behavioral model for assessing patient engagement. The M&S framework, which is under development, will consider patient behavior in context and the underlying factors of human behavior with the help of simulation techniques. The proposed framework will be validated and evaluated through a health care case study. We expect to identify leading factors that influence and affect patient engagement and associated behavioral activities and to illustrate the challenges and complexities of developing simulation models for conducting behavioral analyses within health care settings. Additionally, we will assess patients’ engagement behaviors in terms of achieving health care effectiveness and desired outcomes, and we will specifically evaluate the impacts of patient engagement activities on health care services, patient management styles, and the effectiveness of health interventions in terms of achieving the intended outcomes—improved health and patient satisfaction. INTERNATIONAL REGISTERED REPORT IDENTIFIER (IRRID): PRR1-10.2196/30092