Personalized Health and Meeting Individual’s Needs, Values and Goals Through Measurement

Healthcare is among the most data-intensive industries on earth, and its digital transformation is possible thanks to a radical increase in the amount of data that hardware and software systems can store, process and transmit. 

To ensure complex interconnected systems focus on the needs of individual patients for personalized health, the industry must understand and optimize digital health transformation.

This goal requires the alignment of each interconnected component of a healthcare ecosystem (governance and workforce, interoperability, predictive analytics, and person-enabled health).

Making sure each component performs optimally requires measuring outcomes for each in a standardized, repeatable way. In the fourth of a four-part series, we consider the elements that must be measured to verify the effectiveness of person-enabled health. 

Explore the Four Components of Digital Health Transformation

Person-Enabled Health

Person-enabled health represents the ultimate goal of healthcare: its ability to meet the individual’s needs, values and personalized health goals. 

It values the connection between patients and their care teams to form a partnership based on individual needs and choice. Person-enabled health draws on health metrics based on an interconnected network of hardware and software (including online tools, handheld devices for care anywhere approaches, or apps that enable on-demand health and wellness care). These tools let individuals manage their own health and wellness goals, which are informed by their unique life circumstances, preferences, health needs and choices.

Person-enabled health is measured within these parameters:

1. Personalized healthcare delivery, which comprises the personalization of care and entrusts individuals to be the primary decision-makers when managing their health and wellness. To stay informed about both, these individuals choose the digital tools and technologies (such as personal digital tools, mobile devices and wearables) that best fit the circumstances of their lives and health journeys.
2. Proactive risk management, which focuses on identification of risks to health and wellness, cues individuals and their provider partners on the risks, and provides strategies to intervene early, avoiding risk and sustaining or strengthening progress toward health goals. Proactive care delivery is a decisive shift away from the siloed approaches to disease management. Instead, seamlessly integrating services and enabling care delivery in digital ecosystem environments facilitates the delivery of personalized healthcare to individuals. At a higher level, proactive care delivery entails anticipating and identifying populations’ health risks, intervening to address any issues and protect the health of those populations.
3. Predictive population health, the means by which health system data is mobilized and robust analytics tools track population health outcomes to anticipate risks, such as gaps in health screening and risks of chronic illness or medical error. Predictive population health then prescribes and informs program-level strategies designed to manage and reduce risks to the health and wellness of these population segments. It relies on a robust analytics infrastructure that mobilizes digital tools, dashboards and public reporting strategies to strengthen population health outcomes.

Benefits of Measuring Person-Enabled Health

In many ways, person-enabled health is the goal of digital health transformation: strategic leadership, unified data operations and analysis of personal and population health trends all supporting individuals’ proactive management of their own health and wellness. 

Since every patients’ circumstances and health metrics are unique, person-enabled health is only possible when they’re assessed against detailed, standardized metrics. 

Supported by the other three components of the healthcare ecosystem, person-enabled health ensures that the bigger trends of digital transformation remain focused on the right subject: the individual patient’s needs and choices.