Personalization is now the default. Your favorite brands know this—Amazon surfaces what you need before you search and Spotify curates playlists based on your taste. Netflix is so good at learning your preferences, more than 80% of the shows people watch come from its recommendations.
Now imagine applying that level of intelligence to healthcare.
In healthcare, when communication is generic, patients tune out. When they feel known, seen and understood, they engage. And in our industry, engagement isn’t about clicks. It’s about patient outcomes.
In this post, we’ll explore why personalization in healthcare is no longer optional. We’ll cover the risks of getting it wrong, show how leading systems are doing it right and take a look at where things are headed next—from personalization to prediction.
The Stakes of Personalization in Healthcare
Personalization matters—91% of consumers prefer brands that tailor offers to them, 80% are more likely to make a purchase when the experience is personalized, 71% report feeling frustrated when it isn’t.
This shift in expectations extends well beyond retail and streaming. In healthcare, the implications are far more serious.
It’s not just about delivering a more convenient experience. Personalization plays a critical role in supporting recovery, reducing avoidable readmission and building trust between patients and providers.
When healthcare systems fail to adapt to a patient’s individual needs, the results can be far more damaging than frustration. If a retail experience misses the mark, a customer might walk away. The cost could be an emergency department visit—or worse.
According to McKinsey, patients who experience unplanned, high-cost follow-up care rate their providers 28 points lower in satisfaction compared to those who receive routine follow-up. That 28-point gap is the difference between patient loyalty and patient churn. It is also a clear signal: personalization must be a central part of any engagement strategy.
Where Traditional Tools Fall Short
Many health systems still rely on outdated tools to drive patient engagement. Electronic Health Records (EHRs) and survey platforms play important roles—but they weren’t designed for real-time, proactive communication.
EHRs are designed for clinical documentation and billing, not for building relationships. Even with education tools or portal messaging, patient engagement and adoption often remain low.
Survey vendors have their own limitations. While they can provide retrospective insights, feedback often comes too late—after the opportunity to intervene has passed. These systems are passive by design.
CipherOutreach is different. It enables organizations to reach an average of 87% of patients after discharge, with even higher engagement for many health systems. The difference is not just in volume—it’s in flexibility and timing.
The technology is built to drive engagement and support your staff by delivering the right message to the right patient at the right time. It’s proactive, customizable and designed to meet patients where they are—based on their unique care experience.
How Personalized Outreach Works in Practice: Roger’s Story
CipherHealth provides a way for health systems to automate and personalize communication for each patient—without requiring time-consuming manual follow-up for every interaction.
For example, take Roger, a patient recovering from outpatient knee surgery. He receives follow-up messages in Spanish, via text—his preferred language and channel. The content is tailored to his procedure and recovery timeline.
If Roger reports an issue, such as unexpected pain or concerns about affording medication, CipherHealth flags the response in real time. A care team member is alerted, appropriate follow-up is triggered and Roger may even receive a personalized medication discount coupon—all without needing to download an app or log into a portal.
This approach ensures relevant, timely communication at scale—supporting patients while reducing avoidable escalations.
Proof Point: Intermountain Health Saves Nearly 15M in Estimated Readmission Costs
Personalized communication is often perceived as resource-intensive, but leading health systems are proving otherwise.
At Intermountain Health, post-discharge outreach is delivered across all inpatient and emergency department discharges using CipherHealth. Outreach is tailored by condition, service line and patient demographics—and yet the program requires less than 0.5 FTE per hospital to manage.
By automating routine touchpoints and prioritizing high-risk responses for follow-up, Intermountain has achieved measurable impact at scale:
- Over $15 million in estimated readmission cost savings
- A 10% increase in HCAHPS scores across the outreach program
- Efficient, targeted communication that extends the reach of clinical teams
This program has been in place since 2015, demonstrating that scalable, personalized engagement is both achievable and sustainable over time.
CipherHealth’s Latest Innovations
CipherHealth continues to expand the impact of outreach through new capabilities that drive even deeper engagement, insight and support:
- Web Modality for Seamless Interactions: A browser-based, conversational experience that allows for more complex, interactive engagement—ideal for longer surveys, symptom tracking and education. Patients can respond in a natural, intuitive format and health systems gain more actionable insights.
- Medication Affordability and Adherence Support: Through outreach, patients can receive personalized discount codes based on their prescribed medication, insurance coverage and pharmacy. In testing, about two-thirds of patients received a lower price than their commercial insurance and 100% of uninsured patients saw savings—helping remove a critical barrier to recovery.
- Natural Language Processing for Smarter Follow-Up: Patients can now respond in their own words rather than selecting a number or checkbox. CipherHealth interprets those responses in real time, triggering more relevant alerts and tailoring future messages based on tone, language and reported symptoms.
These innovations make personalized outreach more adaptive, accessible and impactful—for patients and care teams alike.
What’s Next: Predictive Engagement
Personalized outreach is just the beginning. CipherHealth is advancing toward a future where patient communication isn’t just responsive—it’s predictive.
Real-time readmission risk scoring is being built into the platform, using not only clinical data but also patient engagement signals—language, timing and responsiveness. Early testing shows that when behavioral data is included, prediction becomes significantly more accurate.
Patients are flagged as high, medium or low risk directly within the platform, allowing care teams to act faster and more precisely. It’s the difference between catching a warning sign—or reacting to an emergency department visit.
The platform also adapts outreach based on individual behavior. If a patient typically replies in the evening, messages are timed accordingly. If they ignore texts but respond to a voice call, the system adjusts. This is engagement that learns and improves with every interaction.
How CipherHealth Helps
With over a decade of experience, we’ve built a library of proven outcomes and best practices. Our Clinical, Implementation and Customer Success teams bring deep expertise to every interaction—guiding implementation, optimizing programs and helping care teams continuously improve.
What ties it all together is insight. CipherHealth delivers:
- Engagement metrics by channel
- Drill-downs by demographic and condition
- Patient-level and population-level trends
- Intelligence on common concerns, language patterns and symptom timing
CipherHealth helps health systems move from one-size-fits-all outreach to truly patient-centered and personal communication—at scale.
Looking for a smarter way to reduce readmissions and cut costs? Contact us today.
