Patient Empowerment as a Cognitive Process

The concept of patient empowerment has emerged as a new paradigm that can help improve medical outcomes while lowering costs of treatment by facilitating self-directed behavior change. Patient empowerment has gained even more popularity since the 1990’s, due to the emergent of eHealth and its focus on putting the patient in the centre of the interest. Current literature provides systematic reviews of the area, and shows that well defined areas (or dimensions) have eventually emerged in the field. In this paper we argue that patient empowerment should be treated formally as a cognitive process. We thus propose a cognitive model that consists of three major levels of increasing complexity and importance: awareness, engagement and control. We also describe the different constituents of each level and their implications for patient empowerment interventions, focusing on interventions based on information and communication technologies. Finally, we discuss the implications of this model for the design and evaluation of patient empowerment interventions.