New AF4Q Evaluation Publication: Consumer Engagement

The Aligning Forces for Quality (AF4Q) Evaluation team is pleased to announce a new publication on consumer engagement strategies. AF4Q, a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation program, aims to raise the quality of health care by engaging all key stakeholders, including consumers. The variety of AF4Q communities’ consumer engagement activities reveals the multidimensional nature of consumer engagement. In this paper, the authors explicitly articulate these dimensions, develop a framework for classifying the universe of consumer engagement initiatives, and apply this framework to one AF4Q community’s consumer engagement program. The paper discusses the differences in capacity and motivation to act versus actually taking action, and differentiates among four engaged behavior types: healthy, self-management, shopping and health care encounter behaviors.

The purpose of the framework is to help describe and compare consumer engagement programs and stimulate a productive discussion about advancing health and health care through consumer engagement. The applied example illustrates how this framework could help advance the field by expanding policymakers and practitioner’s awareness of the wide range of consumer engagement approaches, providing a structured way to organize and characterize interventions retrospectively, and helping them consider how they can meet program goals both individually and collectively.

Milbank Quarterly has made this article permanently free of charge online. You can access the article by following the link above.