Making Every Moment Count with Personalized Patient Engagement

In an era where personalization has become a cornerstone of customer-centric services across various industries, the healthcare sector is also beginning to embrace personalized strategies aimed at enhancing patient engagement and experience. Traditionally, personalization efforts in healthcare have revolved around defined interactions occurring within the confines of medical settings such as appointment reminders. However, this conventional lens of personalization harbors a fundamental limitation—it overlooks the rich tapestry of a patient’s everyday life outside the clinical environment and the social factors impacting their health. 

The essence of true personalization in healthcare lies beyond clinical interactions and in viewing the patient as a person. It’s about understanding the patient not just as symptoms to be treated, but as a person whose health journey is significantly influenced by their personal characteristics, their behaviors and lifestyle, their internal motivations, and other social determinants. This unique type of insight allows for personalization that has the potential to enhance patient engagement, experience, and ultimately, the outcomes of care.

Understanding the Patient as a Person

Just like in the consumer sector, the pursuit of personalized engagement in healthcare begins with a deep understanding of the individual’s unique needs, preferences, and lifestyle. Predictive, people-based data that goes beyond the chart – like that often used by data-driven marketers – can help connect the clinical understanding of healthcare providers with a patient’s personal characteristics, behaviors, interests and motivations. Here’s how different types of people-based data can play a pivotal role in personalizing patient engagement:

Personal Characteristics

Demographics and personal characteristics such as age, gender and income level provide a fundamental understanding of a patient’s life stage and financial standing. For instance, a financially stable retiree may have different healthcare needs and time availability compared to a busy single parent, thereby requiring different engagement strategies.

Behaviors and Interests

Predictive behavioral data has the potential to unveil the actions, interests, preferences and lifestyles of patients. For example, a patient interested in fitness might respond well to communications wellness check-ups or fitness-centric healthcare programs.

Motivations

Understanding what is likely to motivate patients can help in tailoring communication and engagement strategies. For instance, if a patient is motivated by long-term health goals, personalized messages emphasizing the importance of regular check-ups could resonate well.

While this type of data is not often captured or analyzed during a typical medical exam or doctor’s appointment, it provides a valuable view into who patients are that can be used to enhance engagement and experience.

Personalizing Patient Engagement

Armed with the right data that provides an understanding of patients’ daily lives, healthcare providers have an opportunity to personalize their engagement strategies in a way that patients have come to expect as consumers. Personalization can be woven into the healthcare experience through tailored interactions and enhanced communication such as:

1. Personalized Marketing & Targeted Advertising: Predictive data can help healthcare organizations tailor marketing campaigns to different patient segments via targeted advertising. For example, a campaign for a new pediatric clinic might be personalized to target young families in specific geographic areas. Or a health system may optimize its ad targeting based on its target population’s marketing channel preferences such as email, social media or even CTV.
   
2. Content & Messaging Customization: Insights from people-based data can also shed light on what type of content and messaging is likely to resonate with different audience segments. For instance, creating personalized blog posts or newsletters on topics that are relevant to specific patient groups based on their interest or life stages may be effective in increasing patient education. Or tailoring ad copy to appeal to internal decision-drivers such as enthusiasm for wellness or financial value-seeking in order to increase engagement rates.
   
3. Non-Medical Service Recommendations: Healthcare organizations can use predictive data to recommend additional services or programs to patients based on their life stage and other social determinants. For example, a healthcare provider may offer transportation services to populations where that may be a barrier. Or they may implement digital services such as telemedicine appointments for tech-savvy patients.

Use cases like these have historically been reserved for B2C marketers, but with quality data that sheds light on the patient-as-a-person, healthcare providers can personalize their engagement strategies in ways previously not thought possible.

Elevating Healthcare Personalization with People-Based Insights

The traditional model of healthcare, which often views patient interactions through a narrow clinical lens, is undergoing a powerful evolution. The emerging importance of personalizing patient engagement and experience in order to achieve better outcomes requires a holistic understanding of patients, encompassing their life circumstances, behaviors and preferences both within and outside the clinic walls. This shift, underscored by the integration of people-based data and analytics, is driving a new era of patient-centric care that caters to the unique nature of each patient’s life and health journey.

The path towards maximizing the potential of people-based data and fully integrated personalized patient engagement is not without challenges, ranging from data privacy concerns to the need for multidisciplinary collaboration and supportive technological and policy frameworks. However, despite these considerations, personalized patient engagement is an endeavor that not only enriches the patient experience but also has the potential to contribute to the broader goal of health equity, better outcomes and community well-being.