It was in the early 2010s that healthcare began revamping itself with the goal of providing customer-centric personalization. With a simple motive of benefiting each stakeholder of the value chain, healthcare businesses started prioritizing personalization. However, COVID-19 radically changed the way healthcare customers interact with their care providers. The immense growth and associated innovation in the entire domain, especially 2020 onwards, has made a customer-centric approach more of a necessity than convenience in this post-pandemic transition.

People are increasingly assuming control over their well-being. This reflects in their expectations from care providers to modify care according to their unique histories, preferences and behavior. However, till a few years ago, capturing data that enabled personalized healthcare was a difficult task. On top of it, a lot of care providers struggled with consolidating scattered data so it could provide a comprehensive view of an individual.

While talking of personalized healthcare, a few salient points keep their echoes alive globally:

A recent paper on how health insurers can engage members to improve the value of care depicted the current state of member journey as:

Source: McKinsey & Company

The paper goes on to talk about the critical role of advanced analytics, consumer engagement and personalization, and behavioral economics in realizing and amplifying the value of care in healthcare. On the basis of a target data-driven personalized support, the paper reimagines patient journey to be as following:

Source: McKinsey & Company

Understanding the importance of medical ecosystem in detail: 

The Point is: It doesn't reflect on most healthcare digital touchpoints or user journeys.

We are now at a point where cloud technologies, advanced analytics, and mobile enable myriad data capturing to develop actionable insights. The result is that a holistically tailored customer experience is now possible at a scale never imagined before.

The state of affairs is such that retail behemoths like Amazon and Walmart have begun occupying a huge space within healthcare industry because of their customer-centric models. The industry has its own set of disruptors, who moved fast to the advantage of being digital natives and are now reshaping the entire paradigm.

The customer journey is altering

Personalization has the potential to boost value at each step of the consumer journey.

In healthcare, it works through combining two perspectives –

• Of the customer
• Of the care provider.
• Customers expect to be treated as unique individuals with their own unique set of history, behavior and situations. They expect hassle-free experience and convenience while achieving better health outcomes.
• The care providers, on the other hand, need personalization to empathize with their customers better so they are able to tailor their care channels, timing of communication and curate relevant solutions.

Developing Personalization Capabilities

• Focus Areas
  What are the areas where focusing would create the maximum potential impact and generate higher feasibility? Which areas will deliver higher value? How long do you want to focus on these? What from your martech stack would assist in extracting the best results? Prioritize your priorities.
  
  

• ‘Personalization Engine’

• Tech-Stack: Behind every successful personalization is a cloud-agnostic, scalable tech-stack

  You need technology for two things: data and production. You will need technology that enables rapid building and release of personalization use cases, adheres to various compliances, and can provide straightforward monitoring insights. Production framework also needs to be capable of automating seamlessly. Overall, the entire tech stack should be simple and scalable.

• Agility

  Personalization cannot be done in silos. It absolutely needs a core team that comprises of people from all divisions across the organization. Together, you need to come up with hypotheses to test and put a framework of feedback in place. This will be an ongoing cycle.

Bringing various teams on the same page about the same thing isn’t something that can be achieved overnight. We aren’t going to whitewash the fact that you could easily be looking at work spanning from six to thirty months. This makes personalization a complicated and time-taking task to achieve. However, we at Altudo can help you in taking baby steps with our full-fledged solution Time to Value (TTV) for achieving your personalization goals on the go! Our team of experts at Altudo will help you address and fulfil all your customer needs with the powerful combination of Sitecore Personalize and Acquia Personalization.

You can start seeing value from as soon as mere weeks into the process, and can begin measuring impact from as soon as four-to-six months. To begin seeing value, it is important to assess your maturity in the ‘Personalization Engine’ department. You have a lot at hand already, trust us. Not everything would need to be built from scratch. Proper cataloguing can help you lay solid foundations and develop a roadmap for personalization success. Trust your existing data repository and take it from there.

Of course, it’s time for shameless plugging. We’d love to bring our industry experience to your table and work on building your roadmaps with you. Head over here to know more and talk to us.