Using the taxonomy and the metrics: What to study when and why: Comment on “metrics and evaluation tools for patient engagement in healthcare organization-and system-level decision-making: A systematic review”

Dukhanin and colleagues’ taxonomy of metrics for patient engagement at the organizational and system levels has great potential for supporting more careful and useful evaluations of this ever-growing phenomenon. This commentary highlights the central importance to the taxonomy of metrics assessing the extent of meaningful participation in decision-making by patients, consumers and community members; discusses how the purpose of an evaluation and the organizational relationships among key evaluation stakeholders is likely to influence the choice of metrics in important ways; and suggests a recasting of the metrics in the form of a logic model that supports the selection of metrics that are appropriate for a program given its stage of development and the purposes of the study.