JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

Human behavior plays a vital role in healthcare effectiveness and system performance. Therefore, it is crucially essential to look carefully at the interactions within a system and its dynamics and how it gets affected by behavioral responses and activities from various components of the system, particularly human components and actions. Modeling the patients’ engagement behavior can be valuable in many ways; for example, in evaluating the effect of therapeutic interventions for patients diagnosed with chronic diseases on health improvement, healthcare effectiveness and desired outcomes of changing health lifestyles. Modeling and Simulation (M&S) help us to understand the interaction of a whole system under defined conditions. M&S for patient behavior analysis are concerned with models that attempt to identify certain human behaviors that most likely have an impact on healthcare operation and services. Objectives: The study’s overall aims are: (1) to investigate the impact of patients’ engagement and various human behavior patterns on healthcare effectiveness and achieving desired outcomes of improving patient health and fostering healthy lifestyles, and (2) to construct and validate a framework for modeling patient engagement towards implementing and supporting patient management ‘best practice’, health policymaking, and innovative interventions in healthcare.

Methods:

We intend to extract routinely collected data of different parameters of general patients diagnosed with chronic diseases, such as diabetes and high blood pressure. The plan is to design datasets and extract the health data from a pool of more than four million patient records of different general practices in England, focusing on patients diagnosed with chronic diseases (more than 5% of available records), which links primary care electronic medical records of patients with chronic diseases. Simulation techniques will be employed to study patient engagement and its impact on healthcare effectiveness and outcome measures. The study is intended to integrate available approaches to develop a framework to model how the patient behavior affects healthcare activities and outcomes and to underline the characteristics and the salient factors that operational management need to be aware of when developing a behavioral model for patient engagement. The M&S framework under development will consider patient behavior in context and the underlying factors of human behavior, with the help of simulation techniques. Stock-and-flow diagrams based on defined conceptual models will be produced, and inputs from available data sources will be integrated within the model. The proposed framework will be validated and evaluated through a healthcare case study. Outcome measures: We expect to identify leading factors that influence and affect patient engagement and associated behavioral activities, and illustrate the challenges and complexities of developing simulation models for behavioral analysis within healthcare settings. Additionally, we will assess patient’s engaging behavior in terms of achieving healthcare effectiveness and their desired outcomes, and specifically evaluate the impact of patient engagement activities on healthcare services, patient management style, and effectiveness of health interventions in terms of achieving the intended outcomes of improved health and patient satisfaction.