DescriptionThe traditional transmission model of communication continues to occupy a major portion of the current health communication research agenda, with the typical health communication application being the dissemination of well-crafted informational or persuasive messages through a mix of communication channels to a carefully selected target audience. However, systematic reviews of existing evidence suggest that the impact of this approach tends to be limited and modest at best because other forces, often more powerful, govern people's behaviors. This perspective, along with the increasingly merging areas of interpersonal and mediated communication, highlight a promising landscape advantageous for promoting or otherwise enabling healthier behaviors, positive outcomes, and lifestyles via a broader and more sophisticated range of human and mediated channels of health promotion and health delivery systems. Considering the need for a revised approach, this project (1) outlines a conceptual model of patient engagement where individuals are considered self-determined agents navigating fluctuating levels of uncertainties and stimuli, (2) provides a conceptualization of engagement as a communication-enabled mechanism that can facilitate the ability of individuals to achieve and maintain favorable health outcomes, and (3) conducts a preliminary empirical testing of select components of the model. The primary goal of the empirical study was to test a key assumption of the proposed model, namely that people are most likely to actively engage health information when they experience a triggering event or an event that crosses the threshold of uncertainty that they can tolerate. Analyzing cross-sectional data from a nationally-representative sample of U.S. adults from the Pew Research Center's 2012 Tracking for Health Survey, findings suggest that there are statistically significant differences in patient engagement (information seeking, social support seeking, sharing) between those who report experiencing triggering stimuli versus those who report experiencing signaling stimuli. These findings have implications for the ways and critical periods patients can sufficiently activate engagement behaviors and sustain improved health outcomes.