The design of behavioural interventions labelled as patient‐mediated: A scoping review

Objective Patient‐mediated interventions ( PMI s) directed at patients and/or physicians improve patient or provider behaviour and patient outcomes. However, what constitutes a PMI is not clear. This study described interventions explicitly labelled as “patient‐mediated” in primary research. Methods MEDLINE , EMBASE , Allied and Complementary Medicine, Psych INFO , Health STAR , Social Work Abstracts, CINAHL and Cochrane Library were searched from inception on 1 January 2017 for English language studies that developed or evaluated behavioural interventions referred to as “patient‐mediated” or “patient mediated” in the full text. Screening and data extraction were independently duplicated. Data were extracted and summarized on study and intervention characteristics. Interventions were categorized as 1 of 4 PMI pathways. Results Eight studies (4 randomized controlled trials, 1 observational study and 3 qualitative studies) were included. No studies explicitly defined PMI , and few PMI s were described in terms of content and format. Although 3 studies employed physician interventions, only patient interventions were considered PMI s. One study achieved positive improvement in patient behaviour. Conclusions Research is needed to generate consensus on the PMI concept, employ theory when designing or evaluating PMI s, establish the effectiveness of different types of PMI s, and understand when and how to employ PMI s alone or combined with other interventions.