Chief Digital Officers, or CDOs, are an emerging position in healthcare. As the emphasis on digital health increases, their responsibilities are taking on increased significance, with some industry leaders even touting the role may surpass the CEO’s importance in the organization’s leadership.

Chief Digital Officers need to increase consumer acquisition and engagement, close gaps in care, promote condition management, and drive consumer satisfaction and loyalty by meeting patients where they are on their unique health journeys.

One of the most holistic ways to achieve this is by developing one-to-one personalized digital experiences.

Why is Personalization Important?

The healthcare industry is begging for more personalized options – relevant functions like reminders for medication refills or annual screenings are just a few ways digital experiences can push people along their health journeys. But they only scratch the surface of what’s possible with personalization. By going beyond standard segmented communication and personalizing communication with the right content, timing, and channel, you can further drive action.

Recent McKinsey research has shown that personalized care significantly improves patient experiences and health outcomes. Learning about each consumer’s life outside the healthcare walls allows you to close the personalization gap and make them feel known and compelled to engage with their health and your organization. Personalization is rooted in data and analytics, but the key to true personalization is using that data and aligning it to a consumer’s unique health journey.

The Value of Personalized Experiences

CDOs are the digital leaders of an organization and as such, must drive value by leading digital health transformation within their organizations. Incorporating one-to-one personalization in this transformation affords four unique types of value.

Higher Consumer Acquisition & Engagement

CDOs are being challenged to help their organizations increase the pipeline of new patients or members, and one-to-one personalized digital experiences can help bring these people into your organization.

According to a survey by RockHealth, nearly 90% of U.S. adults have used some form of digital tool to monitor their health. Consumers already crave digital health experiences; now it’s time to make them hyper-personal. Targeted communications, or interventions, boost the patient experience by making each individual feel understood on a personal level, which in turn increases the desire for engagement with your organization. By building relationships with patients before they ever come through your (physical or digital) front door, you can drive new patient or member attainment.

Closed Gaps in Care

When consumers don’t adhere to strict physician recommendations for medication, annual screenings, or well visits, it can have a severe impact on your population’s health. Diagnoses, disease progression, and increased death rates can all directly be tied to gaps in care.

Gaps in your care also carry monetary value – when patients abandon treatment or your organization, you will see a financial impact through lowered patient volume and increased treatment costs.

Advancements in technology and digital health have given us the tools to provide better care to more people earlier, improve health and economic outcomes, and address issues of health equity. Consumers already access the Internet to learn more about their health – in fact, nearly 73% of Americans obtain health-related information online.

One-to-one personalization is critical for making these tools even more effective. It moves consumers to take the next right action for their health, maximizing the value of your digital health investment. These actions can include scheduling and attending a preventive screening, picking up a prescription, or participating in a wellness program

Successful Condition Management

Each consumer’s health journey is like a marathon – it’s long, filled with highs and lows, and needs careful management to ensure a successful pace.

Many consumers have chronic conditions that affect their quality of life. Your healthcare organization must partner with these patients to successfully manage their conditions by guiding them toward healthy lifestyle changes, at-home health monitoring, regular appointments, and medication adherence.

After getting to know your consumers, you can develop and personalize interventions that match their health conditions and address the specific barriers that keep them from effective condition management. Hyper-personalized interventions based on all areas of a patient’s life (SDOH data, financial information, historical engagement, etc.), equip you to increase the likelihood of behavior change and engagement with recommended ongoing care activities.

Increased Satisfaction

As a healthcare executive, one of your primary goals is to realize growth through new consumer acquisition and maintain long-term revenue by retaining current patients. That can only happen by increasing satisfaction with your services and loyalty to your brand.

By connecting with your consumers regularly on a personal level, you can foster a commitment to your healthcare organization that transcends the conventional patient-provider relationship. Arming your patients with the knowledge and tools to maintain a standard of well-being will increase their quality of life and overall health goals, and will give them the incentive to return to your health system when they require care in the future.

Payors can also see significant benefits from taking a one-to-one personalization approach with member engagement. According to a recent BCG study, in just 6 to 12 months, payors that implemented personalization saw customer experience improve by 10%, administrative costs drop by 5% to 10%, and quality standards increase by 20% to 25%.

How Lirio Helps You Achieve One-to-One Personalization

At Lirio, we’ve developed a unique set of health system and payor interventions relevant for nearly any healthcare consumer.

Through Precision Nudging, our unique approach to consumer activation and engagement, our personalization engine for digital health orchestrates these interventions to move consumers along their unique health journeys.

This involves understanding the entire personhood of each consumer and applying behavioral science solutions that personalize the content elements, timing, and communication channels used in each intervention. After receiving consumer responses, our behavioral reinforcement learning agents then learn what makes the consumers tick and what barriers hold them back. Our one-to-one personalization gets progressively smarter and informs future interventions.

With this deeper view of each consumer and their specific needs, we help you maximize the potential for consumer behavior change that ultimately leads to better individual and population health outcomes overall.

What’s Next?

Watch Lirio Chief Evangelist Patrick Hunt and his special guest Ryan Donohue, Strategic Advisor at NRC Health, discuss:

  • What’s driving the COVID-driven delays in putting off care that persist even today
  • The surprising truths about traditional patient experience
  • How access and management correlates with motivation, and what matters most to consumers as they navigate healthcare
  • What healthcare must do to get people to return, and keep them engaged in a more equitable, consumer-oriented future

Watch the webinar here.