The (ill)logics of patient engagement in drug development and evaluation

Olga Zvonareva and Hadewych Honné

Chapter 24 in Handbook of Pharmaceutical Science and Technology Studies, 2026, pp 376-398 from Edward Elgar Publishing

Abstract: A lot of hopes have been placed on patient engagement (PE) across the lifecycle of pharmaceuticals. It is often assumed in scholarship and practice that PE efforts taking place at different stages of this lifecycle will seamlessly connect in a single line, leading to more relevant and better regulated drugs. This chapter questions this assumption. Here, we focus on two stages of the pharmaceuticals lifecycle – development and evaluation for reimbursement – and show that different logics of PE operate at each of these stages. In efforts to engage patients in evaluation of pharmaceuticals we distinguish what we term the logic of eliciting patient-informed value, whereas PE at the stage of drug development revolves around what we term the logic of extracting patient-generated knowledge. Distinguishing these logics allows us to demonstrate potentially problematic divergences between them. These hitherto overlooked divergences mean that seamless plugging of PE at the earlier stage of drug development into evaluation processes and, hence, realization of hopes associated with PE across the pharmaceutical lifecycle, is not guaranteed.

Keywords: Health technology assessment; Drug development; Patient engagement; Value production; Knowledge production; Standardization; Epistemic power; Logics (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026
ISBN: 9781035338443
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.elgaronline.com/doi/10.4337/9781035338450.00036 (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 403 Forbidden

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:elg:eechap:23545_25

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.e-elgar.com

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Chapters from Edward Elgar Publishing
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Jack Sweeney ().