How to Meaningfully Engage with Patient Stories (2024)

Abstract:

With medicine’s return to the humanities in the 1980s and 90s and the emergence of patient engagement as a cornerstone of quality healthcare, patient stories have increasingly been incorporated into all facets of medical training and practice. Patients and their family caregivers are being asked to “share their story” with healthcare providers in medical journals, classrooms, conferences, and even in operational planning under the auspices of quality improvement. Despite the inherent, and increasingly recognized, value of incorporating patient stories into these contexts, less attention has been given to providing healthcare providers the concepts and tools to help them engage with the stories of patients and their family caregivers in a way that maximizes potential benefits.1 This commentary is meant to help fill this gap by using a patient-created digital story as a paradigmatic case for how healthcare providers can engage with stories in a meaningful way.