Patient empowerment has become a hot topic in academic medicine in recent years, however, most measures of empowerment are disease specific, and often focus a particular issue such as communication. There is a real need to develop measure of patient empowerment that is both holistic and can be applied to a general population. OBJECTIVES: To identify a holistic and grounded conceptual model of empowerment that can serve as a foundation for the development of a scale to measure patient empowerment in the general community. METHODS: An extensive literature review was used to review all MEDLINE articles on empowerment over the past 20 years in order to: 1) define what patient empowerment is and how it has been used in literature, and 2) what factors define patient empowerment. Based on the results of this review, a draft conceptual model was developed and validated by a purposively selected group of experts selected from a range of professional backgrounds in medicine. RESULTS: In total 20 experts from 6 different countries participated, who suggested a range of improvements on the conceptual model. They also suggested a number of methods to both measure preference and identify if patient, in fact, had a preference for being empowered. Our study found that patient empowerment can be measured over eight domains, categorized into two main groups: human capital (knowledge; health status/outcomes; literacy; and ownership and responsibility) and health care system resources (access; advocacy; joint decision making and capacity and willingness to engage patients). CONCLUSIONS: This paper demonstrates that patient empowerment is indeed multi-faceted. Future research will focus on developing a scale to measure patient empowerment and to determine whether patients have preferences to be empowered.