title: Enabling eHealth as a Pathway for Patient Engagement: a Toolkit for Medical Practice.
abstract: Academic and managerial interest in patient engagement is rapidly earning attention and becoming a necessary tool for researchers, clinicians and policymakers worldwide to manage the increasing burden of chronic conditions. The concept of patient engagement calls for a reframe of healthcare organizations' models and approaches to care. This also requires innovations in the direction of facilitating the exchanges between the patients and the healthcare. eHealth, namely the use of new communication technologies to provide healthcare, is proved to be proposable to innovate healthcare organizations and to improve exchanges between patients and health providers. However, little attention has been still devoted to how to best design eHealth tools in order to engage patients in their care. eHealth tools have to be appropriately designed according to the specific patients' unmet needs and priorities featuring the different phases of the engagement process. Basing on the Patient Engagement model and on the Positive Technology paradigm, we suggest a toolkit of phase-specific technological resources, highlighting their specific potentialities in fostering the patient engagement process.
authors.affiliation: Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Milan, Italy.
authors.forename: Guendalina
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Graffigna
authors.affiliation: Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Milan, Italy.
authors.forename: Serena
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Barello
authors.affiliation: Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Milan, Italy.
authors.forename: Stefano
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Triberti
authors.affiliation: Virtual Reality Medical Institute, Brussels, Belgium.
authors.forename: Brenda K
authors.initials: BK
authors.lastname: Wiederhold
authors.affiliation: Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Milan, Italy.
authors.forename: A Claudio
authors.initials: AC
authors.lastname: Bosio
authors.affiliation: Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Milan, Italy.
authors.forename: Giuseppe
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Riva
mesh_terms: D020811:Biomedical Technology / Q000639:trends*; D057286:Electronic Health Records / Q000458:organization & administration*; D005544:Forecasting; D006801:Humans; D010358:Patient Participation / Q000379:methods*; D017216:Telemedicine / Q000379:methods*