Improving Collaborative Management of Multiple Mental and Physical Health Conditions: A Qualitative Inquiry into Designing Technology-Enabled Services for Eliciting Patients' Values

People with multiple chronic conditions (MCC) face challenges planning health care collaboratively with primary care clinicians, particularly when their priorities conflict. These challenges intensify with symptoms of anxiety or depression. Elicitation of patients' values is promoted as a means to aligning patient and clinician priorities in primary care, and as a component of psychotherapy for anxiety and depression. But, these approaches remain siloed. We conducted a qualitative interview study to understand patients' preferences for Technology Enabled Services (TESs) to coordinate values elicitation across primary and mental health care settings. Many participants preferred face-to-face elicitation by a mental health clinician; some preferred elicitation via telehealth and some preferred self-directed elicitation. Participants' preferences were influenced by: 1) how they perceived the rationale and benefits of values elicitation; 2) how they perceived the training and credibility of people facilitating elicitation; and 3) how they perceived their own capacity to engage in values elicitation. Participants also shared numerous concerns about values elicitation that warrant critical examination of TESs to support it.