How and why we engage patients as research partners

As health researchers, we’re always looking for fresh approaches to ensure our work is relevant and useful to patients and their health care providers. One way we’ve tried to increase the relevance of our health-related research is by engaging with patients and communities as partners. A growing body of evidence shows that patients’ engagement can improve the feasibility, acceptability, and quality of research. The six of us are involved in several initiatives at Mathematica that engaged patients to improve our research. In the blog below, we highlight how patients and community members provided valuable advice about conducting a more comprehensive search of effective interventions that address trauma among youth, how they helped develop health care quality measures, and how they helped implement a psychiatric crisis respite intervention. The following insights borrow from a presentation we prepared for the 2020 International Conference on Patient- and Family-Centered Care. (author introduction)