What is personalized patient care?
Personalized patient care is the practice of tailoring clinical communication, education, and follow-up to
a patient’s individual context: their condition, language, literacy, preferred channel, cultural background,
and stage in the care journey. It is the opposite of one-size-fits-all messaging. When done at scale,
personalized care improves appointment adherence, reduces readmissions, and raises HCAHPS scores.
Personalized patient care should not be confused with personalized medicine. Personalized medicine
refers to treatment selection based on genomic or biomarker data. Personalized patient care refers to
how health systems communicate, educate, and coordinate with patients as individuals.
Engaged patients are the foundation of personalized care. Personalization tailors what
the system says and does for each individual. Engagement is how often and how well the patient
responds. The two reinforce each other.
Positive relationships can help improve patient satisfaction and yield patient loyalty. And when a patient
has a consistent, trusted source of healthcare, health outcomes can improve as well.
What engaged patients look like
Engaged patients are:
- Informed. They understand their health status and the recommended treatment.
- Heard. They communicate with their providers and participate in shared decision-making.
- Empowered. They believe they can change their health outcomes.
- Active. They take action on their health based on personal learnings and overall understanding.
What personalization looks like by care setting
Personalization is not the same task in every care setting. The table below maps what ‘personalized’
means across the four most common settings.
| Care setting | What personalization looks like |
| Primary care | Reminders tailored to chronic conditions, preferred language, and preferred channel. Annual wellness visit outreach for Medicare attribution. |
| Secondary care | Pre-procedure prep by specialty (ortho vs GI vs cardio), post-procedure check-ins, adherence tracking for specialty medications. |
| Hospital inpatient / discharge | Personalized discharge instructions at health-literacy level, 24/72/168 hour post- discharge outreach, medication reconciliation. |
| Ambulatory / urgent care | Personalized discharge instructions at health-literacy level, 24/72/168 hour post- discharge outreach, medication reconciliation. |
Why personalized patient care matters
Although engaging patients – and keeping them engaged – can be challenging, it is a vital process for attracting and retaining them. Effectively engaging patients in their care is essential to improving health outcomes and staff efficiency, increasing patient satisfaction, and reducing costs while driving revenue.
“The Patient Engagement Playbook” discusses how greater patient engagement can:
Improve health outcomes: Strong patient engagement increases adherence to treatment regimen recommendations among patients, which in turn leads to fewer complications and re-hospitalizations. Several U.S. studies recently reported coordinated care trials that actively engaged patients with chronic disease resulted in significant mortality reductions compared to a control group who merely took appropriate medications. The studies suggest chronically ill patients who are engaged in their care live longer than unengaged peers who otherwise receive similar treatment, meaning health and well-being are fostered by engaged and activated patients. [1, 2, 3]
Enhance staff efficiency: Patient engagement strategies can help reduce front-end staff workload by reducing time spent on phone calls which take up a significant portion of time and can lead to support staff burnout. With more valuable time back, staff can spend more time on direct patient care.
Increase patient satisfaction: Personalized and unique patient engagement enables patients to feel heard and seen and empowers them to make decisions about their care. This can enhance overall satisfaction, and facilitate longer-standing relationships with providers while improving patient experience measures.
Reduce cost and drive revenue: Patient engagement directly contributes to outcomes affecting hospital costs and reimbursement for health systems. Executing effective patient engagement strategies also means better patient retention and referrals.
The future of healthcare: Delivering personalized care experiences
Consumer research consistently shows that 80%+ of healthcare consumers value personalized
care. Multiple 2024-2026 surveys, including CVS Health, Deloitte, and Press Ganey reports, find that
most patients want their primary care physician to know family medical history, lifestyle context, and
communication preferences.
What this really comes down to is embracing a more holistic, whole-person approach to healthcare that patients ultimately desire. So, how can you deliver more personalized care experiences?
Provide flexible care
First and foremost, personalization should extend to how patients would like to receive care. For example, would they prefer a virtual, telehealth, or in-person visit? Are they open to non-traditional healthcare options, such as holistic approaches involving diet, exercise, alternative medicine, or counseling?
The flexibility of care service offerings allows patients to manage their healthcare experiences in a unique way that aligns with their goals and values, encouraging them to remain activated throughout their care journeys. Remember to ask the patient about their goals, values, and fears around care — a practice that is critical to providing personalized and individualized care plans.
Optimize communication
Personalization should also apply to communication. More than ever, providers and patients agree that good communication and understanding are the keys to successful care plans and health outcomes.
How we communicate has changed dramatically within the lifetime of nearly every patient, however – and it is no longer sufficient to merely send mass push communications. To deliver personalized care, you must design and implement a unique, conversational relationship with your patients.
Think about what makes your patients unique and how best you can connect with them. What languages do they speak? What kinds of messages resonate best with certain patients? Make sure to keep these in mind, among a number of other factors:
- Have a conversation: Enable conversational messaging that allows both patients and providers to reach out or respond. This empowers patients to ask questions, share concerns, or provide feedback and allows providers to gain a greater perspective and understanding of their patients.
- Honor patient preferences: enable communication in patients’ preferred channels – text, phone, or email – to deliver a more personalized care experience.
- Provide language support: offer communication in patients’ preferred/native language. Research suggests those with limited English proficiency (LEP) face barriers to health care access, experience lower quality care, and suffer worse health outcomes. By addressing language barriers, patients can better understand their care needs and ultimately make better-informed decisions for their health.
- Personalize messages: spamming patients with mass communications that are non-personalized and questionably relevant will make it harder for the patient to filter out what information from their provider is actually important. Keep it conversational and unique.
- Leverage AI-enabled capabilities: streamline unique workflows with the use of customized automation to ensure personalization; empower patients with information and self-service opportunities (scheduling, pre-appointment instructions, or referrals).
- Utilize data and analytics: embrace data to inform intelligent communication strategies. Patient communication platforms may provide insightful analytics, such as confirmation and no-show rates, which would help you determine the ideal timing for sending messages.
According to McKinsey and Company’s Next in Personalization 2021 Report, companies that engage in customer personalization produce 40 percent more in revenue than their peers that do not. Therefore, personalized care is not only beneficial to the patient but it’s also profitable for health systems in terms of increasing the bottom line.
A personalized patient journey: referral to follow-up
The fastest way to explain personalization at scale is to walk through a single patient journey end to end.
- Referral received. The health system identifies the patient’s preferred channel (SMS) and preferred
language (Spanish) from the EHR and communication preferences record. - Welcome and scheduling. An automated SMS introduces the specialty practice, confirms the referral,
and offers three available appointment slots. - Pre-visit prep. Three days before the appointment, the patient receives pre-visit instructions at an
8th-grade reading level in Spanish. Includes fasting rules, parking, and digital intake forms. - Day-of reminders. A reminder message goes out 24 hours before and 2 hours before the visit.
- Post-visit follow-up. Within 48 hours, the patient receives a satisfaction survey, a summary of visit
instructions, and any prescription reminders. - Ongoing engagement. The system schedules the next preventive outreach (annual wellness visit,
screening reminder) based on the patient’s demographic and clinical context.
At every step, the content, channel, and timing are personalized to the individual. At scale, this is what
Artera automates.
Eight more ways to deliver personalized care
In addition to providing flexible care and optimizing communication, here are additional ways to deliver personalized care experiences to your patients:
1. Define a customer-centric vision statement
Define a vision statement from key expectations identified in patient satisfaction surveys. A vision statement provides guiding values for every service staff member in your health system and acts as a reference point for your patient experience goals.
2. Equip employees with customer service skills
Like any customer, patients want to feel heard, instead of being “processed” from a script. Training patient-facing staff on how to handle customer emotions with empathy is crucial to creating personal experiences.
3. Provide omnichannel choices
In today’s digital world, patients expect to access customer service in the communications channel they find most convenient whether it’s phone, text, email, or social media. Patients expect your business to be there when they need you, so provide omnichannel communication choices to both retain and attract patients to your healthcare system.
4. Offer Self-Service Experiences
People are used to finding information by themselves in today’s digital world and expect the same speed and convenience when they are patients. Patient portals, appointment self-scheduling, automated check-ins, and other customer-centric resources provide customers with self-service tools they can easily and conveniently use throughout their entire patient journey.
5. Engage in Frequent touch points – but not too many
According to the aforementioned CVS survey, both consumers and providers feel customized text reminders or phone follow-ups of screenings and checkups are important to good health and a patient’s ability to successfully follow a prescribed care plan. Use digital tools like a patient communication platform to engage in frequent interventions and touch points to ensure open lines of communication between the patient and provider.
Make sure not to over communicate with your patients, however, as this can lead to fatigue or patients opting out of future messages. Researchers in a JAMA Open Network study found that individuals who received 10 or more text messages from their provider in a year were significantly more likely to opt out of future messages: “The findings suggest that a high volume of automated health care messages may be associated with a greater likelihood of patients opting out of future messages and that health care systems should use these messages judiciously to minimize message fatigue,” the researchers wrote.
6. Use patient satisfaction surveys to assess what’s working
Promoting positive patient experience is important when offering a holistic healthcare package. One of the best ways to listen and learn from your customers is to ask them. Use patient satisfaction surveys to ask customers what they think is working and what needs improvement. The results can help optimize your customer service and ensure it’s as personalized as possible. Implement automated tools such as customized surveys through text or embedding a personalized link for more insightful feedback and a higher rate of response.
7. Provide platforms for employee feedback
As the eyes and ears of any contact center, service agents are crucial to delivering personalized care experiences. They’re also the ones speaking to your customers every day, which means they’ll be the first to notice trends that can help improve your customer service offerings. Providing platforms for them to contribute ideas and constructive feedback can therefore help stimulate small changes that make a massive difference.
Your customer service staff are the frontline when it comes to interacting with patients so it’s crucial they are trained on delivering personalized care experiences. It’s also important to get constructive feedback from your support staff on how patients are responding to your customized patient services and how to improve them. Set up a regular procedure by which your customer service staff can offer ideas and observations in an open and non-partisan environment.
8. Evaluate and evolve your services
Over time, patient profiles will change so you need to consistently review their preferences and seek feedback to ensure you are still offering a personalized experience. Once you have this insight, your organization needs to evaluate the data and respond to the preference changes by evolving your services to keep up with consumer demand.
How to measure personalized patient care
Four metrics to watch on a monthly dashboard:
- HCAHPS patient experience scores (inpatient) and CG-CAHPS (ambulatory). Patients perceive
personalized communication and rate accordingly. - Adherence rates: appointment show rate, medication refill rate, care plan completion rate.
- Patient-reported outcome measures (PROMs) where appropriate to the specialty.
- Segment-level engagement: response rate on outreach by language, channel, age, and condition
cohort.
By the numbers: why personalization matters now
- 88% of patients expect retail-level personalization from healthcare (BST Quarterly, 2024).
- Personalized healthcare campaigns generate 5 to 8x ROI compared to mass communication
(McKinsey). - Quality metrics rise 20 to 25% with stronger digital engagement (Boston Consulting Group).
- $200 billion annual savings opportunity in US healthcare from personalization at scale
(Significo). - 85% of consumers believe personalized care is important; 83% want their primary care physician
to know personal context (CVS Health, 2022).
Personalized care drives measurable clinical outcomes
This is not soft. Personalization at scale ties to specific clinical wins:
- Diabetes risk reduction up to 50% when lifestyle interventions are personalized to the patient’s
risk profile and context (CDC). - Blood pressure complications cut 33 to 50% when patient education and follow-up are tailored
to literacy level and language (CDC). - Readmission rates drop 15 to 25% with personalized post-discharge communication (peer-
reviewed studies summarized in Artera’s readmissions guide). - Medication adherence improves 20 to 30% with personalized refill reminders and side-effect
outreach (American Journal of Hypertension). - Awareness of pre-diabetic status rises 80% when patients receive risk-personalized outreach vs.
generic content.
Tactic 9: segment patients by risk tier
Personalization at scale starts with risk stratification. Use a three-tier model:
- High-risk (5 to 10% of patients): clinician-led outreach plus automated check-ins. Frequent
touchpoints, clear escalation paths. - Rising-risk (20 to 25%): proactive automated outreach to keep patients from progressing into
the high-risk tier. SDOH screening, medication adherence support, lifestyle interventions. - Low-risk (65 to 70%): light-touch personalization. Annual wellness reminders, screening
outreach, preference confirmation.
This pyramid is the foundation. Without it, every patient gets the same blast and personalization stops
being personalized.
Tactic 10: scale personalization with AI and automation
True 1:1 personalization for thousands of patients is impossible without automation. AI Voice Agents
and conversational AI platforms (like Artera) let health systems pull EHR context, choose the patient’s
preferred channel and language, and deliver personalized content at the right moment without adding contact-center headcount. The 94% self-service rate Artera Flows Agents deliver is what scaling
personalization actually looks like.
Tactic 11: integrate remote patient monitoring and wearables
Wearables and remote patient monitoring (RPM) generate the personalization signal. A patient’s resting
heart rate, glucose pattern, or activity level is more useful than their last office visit for personalizing the
next intervention. Modern personalization programs ingest RPM data, set baseline-driven (not generic)
alert thresholds, and trigger outreach when the patient’s actual data deviates.
Tactic 12: factor in social determinants of health
Personalization stops at the front door of clinical care if SDOH are ignored. Transportation, food security,
housing stability, language, literacy, and digital access all shape what ‘personalized’ should mean for a
given patient. Best-in-class programs screen for SDOH at intake and route flagged patients to social
work, transportation, and food-aid resources alongside the clinical care plan.
Personalization as a marketing and acquisition lever
Personalization does not stop at care delivery. It is also one of the strongest marketing levers in
healthcare. McKinsey research shows personalized acquisition campaigns deliver 40% more revenue
than non-personalized peers. For health systems competing for patients, personalization is increasingly
a margin-maker, not a cost center.
Frequently asked questions
What is personalized patient care?
Personalized patient care tailors clinical communication, education, and follow-up to a patient’s
individual context: condition, language, literacy, preferred channel, and stage in the care journey.
What does personalized care mean in healthcare?
In healthcare, personalized care means that clinical decisions and patient-facing communication are
customized to the individual, not delivered from a single standard template. It covers personalized
treatment plans, communication, education, and monitoring.
How is personalized patient care delivered at scale?
Health systems deliver personalized care at scale using patient segmentation, AI-driven messaging
platforms that select channel and content per patient, and EHR-integrated workflows that trigger the
right action at the right time.
Why does personalized patient education matter?
Patients retain and act on education that matches their reading level, language, and condition.
Personalized education has been shown to raise adherence and reduce avoidable readmissions
compared to generic pamphlets.
How do you measure personalized patient care?
Measure personalized care with HCAHPS or CG-CAHPS patient experience scores, adherence rates
(appointment show, medication), patient-reported outcomes, and segment-level engagement metrics
across communication channels.
Overall, by prioritizing personalized care experiences, your organization has the potential to shift the clinical paradigm from “What’s the matter?” to something more meaningful: “What matters to you?”
Optimized patient engagement strategies are essential for healthcare providers looking to properly address patient needs, which have shifted dramatically as a result of healthcare consumerization and the COVID-19 pandemic. Now more than ever, providers need to consider the six strategies in The Patient Engagement Playbook to facilitate greater patient engagement, connection, and understanding.
