Patient Engagement Activities and Patient Experience: Are Patients With a History of Depression the Canary in the Coal Mine?

Little is known about the effectiveness of primary care practices’ efforts to engage patients in their health and health care. We examine the association between patient engagement efforts and patients’ experiences of care. We found no association between an unweighted count of patient engagement activities and patient experience. Compared with the bottom quartile of practices, however, the top quartile had better performance on patient experience domains of communication, front-office staff, and organizational access (out of nine domains). Furthermore, patients reporting a diagnosis of depression have higher ratings across five domains of patient experience when in practices with higher levels of patient engagement activities measured using an unweighted scale. Future research is needed to understand how the benefits of patient engagement activities can accrue to more patient subgroups. These promising results suggest that payers and policy makers should continue to support implementation and benchmarking of patient engagement efforts across practices.