How Do We Encourage Patient Engagement?

F ollowing on the theme from my previous editorial (Mayer, 2014), I want to address another goal identified in Delivering High-Quality Cancer Care: Charting a New Course for a System in Crisis (Institute of Medicine, 2013): engaged patients. The report identified patient engagement as the number one recommendation. The recommendation states that patients and their families should be given understandable information about their cancer (see Figure 1). But this recommendation is incomplete without including concepts about patientcentered communication, shared decision making, and patient activation. I want to explore each of these and then circle back to how we can encourage patient engagement in cancer care.