At Significo, our mission is to humanize healthcare technology to make it a more empowering, effective, and engaging experience. In every area of our lives, we as consumers are experiencing the power of technology and a personalized, engaging user experience. But in healthcare, technology is missing the opportunity to deeply engage and support people. Just like in our personal lives, we’re overwhelmed by quantity but not always quality — too many choices, but not necessarily ones that are beneficial to us. One important part of humanizing healthcare is personalizing the user experience throughout the health journey.
Personalized health is not only about educating or inspiring people, but giving them fully personalized support to manage their health and preventative care. This personalization is also one of the most important factors in creating an engaging experience which leads to better health outcomes: improved quality of life, better health habits, and informed decision-making on their health. This also benefits providers and payers, with higher engagement with the platform leading to cost savings.
What does this look like? For one of our large insurance company partners, we created a personalized health coach, providing tailored fitness, nutrition, and relaxation advice, all based on scientific principles to enhance health and wellbeing.
An area we’re exploring here is the different types of interactions that can support people in their health journey without being educational. One example of this could be personalized charts, because user research suggests that digital health tools are more effective if users can monitor their success. Many of the apps and tools we have built for our partners allow users to track their progress and see the impacts of their continued engagement in the tool.
Personalization goes beyond the mere selection of appropriate content or interactions. Truly personalizing the experience for health technology should also include selecting the correct intervention at the correct time for the user: providing proven, scientifically- and clinically-backed interventions based on a person’s unique needs, goals, and behaviors — not only what is going to have the best health outcome, but what will be most relevant to the user and likely to be chosen. By taking both factors into account, we can choose interactions that will have the most impact. This requires combining our data with AI and machine learning so that we know what each person needs, when, and in what configuration. Our technology helps determine what interaction is going to a specific user, and what that interaction will include, so that each user is getting what they need to better manage their health.
This all needs to be based on a good software architecture, deep understanding of data, and the highest level of data security and trustworthiness. Here’s where our combination of technology experts — including data scientists like myself — with a team of medical and clinical experts is so important. Because we’re dealing with people’s health, not just their data, so we need to understand what to provide them using technology that will improve their health, but also remembering medical ideas that go back thousands of years, e.g., Do No Harm. This is at the heart of what we do, and even as we explore innovative ideas, we never forget that we are building for real people and the responsibility that comes with that.
