Jeff Wandzura
Chief Growth Officer, Curatio
The detrimental and cascading impact of loneliness and isolation is being felt around the world. This is especially true for those managing complex conditions, today and every day. To help combat this lack of connectedness, patients are turning to digital social channels to fill the void.
Health care organizations have traditionally been very limited in how they participate in these channels due to regulatory and privacy concerns and other safeguards deemed essential in a health care setting. However, the growth and utilization of these platforms for health care related needs continues to organically grow.
At the same time, health care organizations are looking to deepen and extend the reach of their relationships with patients beyond one-dimensional treatments, the four walls of a clinic, or episodic touchpoints during medication refills.
How can health care organizations foster community and leverage another tool to support the patients they serve in a safe, intuitive, and effective way? The key is building dedicated patient communities that have been built from the ground up to address the unique needs of health care.
Engaged, informed, and activated patients
Every patient journey is unique and requires a personalized, dynamic approach to drive optimal healthy behaviours and outcomes. In order to truly empower individuals in their health journey, every touchpoint has to be relevant, timely, and personalized in order to make a meaningful difference.
Achieving this goal of personalization and empowerment at scale in a health care context has traditionally been a difficult task. However, using the power of artificial intelligence (AI), mass personalization is now a reality in helping patients manage their health challenges in a more intelligent and compelling way.
When managing a new health challenge for the first time, whether this be a new diagnosis, starting a new treatment, or making a proactive health change, entering a discovery phase is a common first step. Searching Google and sourcing insight from others in the community are two common actions that lay the foundation for all future actions.
The acute need for community
Social connectivity, or lack thereof, is a major variable that is often forgotten. When surrounded by a group of peers on the same journey, it empowers an individual to take control of their health, drives accountability, retention and adherence to therapy.
To enable authentic connections that provide support, a sophisticated AI model is applied to identify those in the community who are in the best position to support one another in their journey. This proprietary, multifactor approach to matching individuals takes into account condition and profile-specific variables. The individual is in full control through a double opt-in process that needs to be accepted on both sides, and also provides a configurable level of anonymity.
This same logic is applied to the personalization of interventions that meets every individual where they are in their journey. Behavioural change interventions are predicated on understanding the current state of a patient, behavioural models that take into account a wide array of attributes to predict the best way to nudge and a method to predict interaction outputs.
The next frontier in patient support is going to take into account the entire patient and social connectivity. Tailored behavioural nudges will unlock the full potential in driving informed, empowered, and engaged patients.
Consistent, long-tail engagement drives healthy behaviours
Curatio builds regulatory and privacy compliant peer-to-peer communities in partnership with health care organizations. Visit Curatio to explore how dedicated digital patient communities are helping support, inform, and activate patients in over 100 countries and 15 languages during these challenging times.
