Patient engagement in digital health: a preliminary observation on user-centred and stakeholder feedback

DESIGN: Prospective cohort study SETTING: In this pilot study, we recruited patients from a secondary pain clinic in Boston, Massachusetts. PARTICIPANTS: In this pilot study, we recruited patients from a secondary pain clinic within the Spaulding Rehabilitation network in Boston, Massachusetts, USA. We enrolled 37 patients who initially came in for a clinical visit with the principal investigator of the study. Of the 37 patients, 14 patients who continued to enrol/join after December 2024 received the 'DigitalPulse' to drive engagement. OBJECTIVES: To present a roadmap for our efforts to contextualise engagement in our digital health technology study and showcase our attempts to incorporate an engagement approach inspired by the Method for Program Adaptation through Community Engagement. Building on this, we further incorporated continued feedback and revision beyond the prototype of the user-centred feedback form ('DigitalPulse') to include expanded stakeholders such as clinicians and research assistants. RESULTS: From these patients, we observed that our approach produced highly variable changes in engagement with slight increases at the group level. CONCLUSION: From our observations, we have found that it is important to incorporate iterative refinements and expanded stakeholder involvement in designing patient-centred digital health tools to improve engagement. Overall, we report a process to address engagement and emphasise the need for continuous personalisation in digital health interventions.