Changes in healthcare engagement during the COVID-19 pandemic

Healthcare engagement, defined as the self-efficacy to enact the behaviors needed to obtain optimal benefit from health services, is an important aspect of healthcare quality. Measuring changes to healthcare engagement is essential to informing current and ongoing adaptations to health service delivery. The objective of the present study was to explore the responsiveness of the recently developed PROMIS^® Healthcare Engagement measure (PHE), a patient-reported outcome, through investigating the impact of COVID and COVID-related healthcare disruptions on healthcare engagement from pre- to peri-pandemic.

Baseline data (2018-2019) were collected via a national mail survey of Veterans receiving VA care. For follow-up data, a subset of participants was randomly selected to be invited to a follow-up survey. Administrative data was used from the VA's Corporate Data Warehouse (CDW). We used mixed effects linear modeling to compare changes in healthcare engagement from baseline to follow-up between Veterans who reported healthcare disruptions and Veterans who did not report healthcare disruptions, adjusting for covariates.

From baseline to follow-up, healthcare engagement scores increased on average by 2.84 points. Compared to Veterans who reported no disruptions, Veterans who experienced COVID-related healthcare disruptions demonstrated greater decreases to healthcare engagement (difference scores ≥ - 1.98, ps ≤ 0.002) Further, Veterans with more healthcare disruptions showed greater decreases in healthcare engagement relative to those with fewer healthcare disruptions, such that Veterans with 2 healthcare disruptions (difference score = -4.20) significantly differed from Veterans reporting only 1 healthcare disruption, and Veterans reporting 3 or more disruptions (difference score = -3.75) significantly differed from those with 2 disruptions.

Our results provide preliminary evidence of the PHE's responsiveness through demonstrating that environmental factors, such as pandemic-related factors, influence healthcare engagement. The COVID-19 pandemic had a complex effect on healthcare engagement, with healthcare engagement scores increasing overall during the pandemic but Veterans reporting COVID-related healthcare disruptions showing decreased changes in healthcare engagement. These findings support the utility of the PHE as a measure of healthcare engagement.