How Digital Patient Personalization Increase Engagement

July 1, 2016

The healthcare industry is being disrupted by technology and healthcare organisations are realising that they have to put their patients at the centre of their strategies and innovative solutions. Personalisation is a key strategy that not only helps healthcare institutions understand the basic needs a patient has through their journey with them but also helps to engage patients more effectively.

This patient centric approach to healthcare has seen the development of tools such as virtual health coaches, chronic disease management systems, behavioural intervention schemes, remote health monitoring and more advanced doctor/patient communication systems. This article aims to look at how healthcare companies can engage with patients digitally with personalisation with some real-life examples added in for validation.

What is Personalisation?

Personalisation means to offer your users a more tailored experience across multiple channels and devices. Data is key component in the development of a personalisation strategy and often businesses build user profiles that encompass user behaviour based on this data. These user profiles can be used to create a set of personas that loosely represent the top types of consumers and become the focus for a personalised nurture funnel for all users that behave in certain ways.

Personalisation in Health Care

The recent advancements in technology mean that healthcare organisations have access to a lot more useful and meaningful data. This data is coming from several sources including online data all the way through to traditional clinical trials. By having access to this data on patient behaviours and needs, healthcare companies can ensure that patient personalisation continues to advance, leading to better patient experiences. Here are some of the tools already surfacing to help improve personalisation and, in turn, the user journey for patients across the healthcare industry.

Online Healthcare Patient Portal/ Patient Relationship Management Platforms
This is the key starting point for any patient-centric strategy because, by providing an online patient portal, you will receive reliable data from patients enabling you to maximize on personalisation opportunities. Your portal can ask for information like family general practitioner, specific types of treatment, visit history, upcoming appointments and billing information. With this data you will be able to tailor messages to your patients about things you know are relevant to their journey. Here are some examples of how this information could help to make a patient's experience more personal:

Medication and Appointment Reminders - Once you have information on office visits, you can begin to offer an alert system that reminds users of their upcoming appointments. You can also remind them of medication they have to take daily and at certain times.

Interactive Content - You can send them relevant, interactive content that helps them understand their ailments in more detail and ways to deal with certain signs and symptoms. You could also provide them with useful graphs and charts as well as timelines to show the progress of their treatment.

Cross Provider - In an ideal world, each health portal would connect to another so patients don't have to input the same information across several providers. Patients will be able to login into one central portal and view all of their history, from appointments, treatments, injections and so on.

Ready to take your company through a digital transformation? Talk to Prototype digital strategy consulting today.

What are your thoughts on patient personalisation in health care? Have you experienced any forward-thinking examples of how personalisation is being used? Tell us over on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.

Written by
Alexander Rauser
Alexander Rauser

CEO

Alexander Rauser is the author of Boardroom Guide to Digital Accountability and Digital Strategy: A Guide to Digital Business Transformation, and creator of the DSX Program, a digital strategy and transformation program for Enterprises.

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