A new whitepaper published by London, Ontario-based Ivey International Centre for Health Innovation examines the role of personalization in the healthcare industry.
According to the whitepaper, healthcare is predominately designed and implemented at the system level with a "one size fits all" perspective, with little thought given to patient preference and values. Currently, there are few opportunities for patient choice and input into clinical, service and operational decisions and healthcare services are not tailored to individual needs of preferences.
The whitepaper presented three lessons healthcare systems can learn from other industries when it comes to personalization.
Lesson One: Use consumer preference to achieve personalization. Personalization is a common strategy employed by many industries that serve the same populations as the healthcare industry. Like the industries that already utilize personalization, the healthcare industry needs to use active, passive and progressive personalization in order to understand consumer preferences.
Active personalization enables consumers to make choices to meet their needs, such as placing a specific order for a product or service. One opportunity for health systems to engage in active personalization is by creating opportunities for consumers to link their personalized mobile health tools to formalized health systems so healthcare providers can collaborate with consumers to achieve their health goals.
Passive personalization enables industries to gather information about consumer patterns and to better understand what customers want, how they want to engage or be served and to link or match a product with a user demographic or typology. In many industries, software analytic programs are used to monitor user preferences and to gain passive market intelligence. Although health systems track utilization of health services to understand patient volumes, frequency and prevalence of health services used, they do not use passive personalization tools.
Progressive personalization enables industries to obtain consumer feedback in order to improve products as the consumer uses them or as consumer feedback is obtained. The healthcare industry has not embraced progressive personalization methods to anywhere near the extent evident in other industries.
Lesson Two: Use segmentation to achieve a "one size fits one" strategy. Segmentation is a strategy that acknowledges and understands one size does not fit all. Consumers vary widely in terms of their preferences, what is meaningful, what choices they will make and how they want to access services. Segmentation is used to categorize consumers into groups based on their preferences, values, needs or even demographics.
Typically, health systems use standardized approaches to programs or services based on best evidence, and services are designed to achieve specific health or disease outcomes rather than meeting personalized approaches to care tailored to fit with the needs and values of the population. Individuality may be a concept healthcare systems need to consider in order to transform from a knowledge intensive industry, which aspires to provide standardized care based on best evidence rather than individualized approaches to care based on individuality and value.
Lesson Three: Use customization as a strategy for personalization. Customization is another strategy for achieving personalization, and it differs from segmentation in that some of the responsibility of personalization lies with the consumer rather than the supplier. Rather than guessing or studying customer desires, customization involves strategies that enable the consumer to instruct the company or organization on how best to engage them to achieve their goals.
The most important feature of customization may be the ability of healthcare systems to actively engage consumers in tailoring services to achieve value. In the healthcare industry, there could be an opportunity to better understand "mass customization" due to the increasing volume of patients as a result of factors including increased life expectancy and growing prevalence of chronic illness. Customization strategies that focus on prevention and self-management of health and wellness will effectively strengthen quality of care through mass customization, while at the same time reducing demands for expensive hospital care.
In healthcare, personalized medicine and advances in health IT make customization possible. These advances offer health systems opportunities to engage consumers directly to "customize" health services and approaches to care, while at the same time allowing innovative communication strategies to engage consumers more directly in achieving value relative to health, wellness and quality of life.
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