Recipes
Healthcare

Using Segment to deliver personalized care

In this recipe, you’ll learn how Segment’s Journeys can be used to help build and deliver personalized care treatment plans, at scale, to your patients based on their condition and health status.

Atit Shah

Made by Atit Shah

This recipe uses features that are available as add-ons to your Segment plan. Contact us to learn more about what plan is best for you.  

The time to modernize and personalize patient engagement is now. In a recent study by CVS Health, 85% of the U.S. consumers wish their healthcare experiences were more personalized. 80% of patients prefer to use digital communication to interact with healthcare providers and brands. We have seen the eCommerce industry lead the way in customer-first experiences, proving that personalization can significantly boost acquisition, conversion, and retention rates. By adopting similar strategies, Healthcare organizations can help improve patients outcomes by delivering personalized care journeys.

This recipe demonstrates how, for example, a health tech company could use Journeys to facilitate the management of a chronic condition, whether for provider groups focusing on population health, or for payers looking to improve the star ratings of their health plans. 

Please note that this recipe merely provides suggestions and examples for the use of Segment.  It should not be taken or used as either clinical or legal advice, whether about patient care or the security and protection of PHI.

You should consult your legal, security and/or clinical experts as needed before implementing solutions for any new use cases.

Step 1: Connect your website to Segment

The first step is to integrate Segment on your website using Segment’s Javascript library so you can learn how your patients engage with you online. 

  1. Create a Source in Segment to collect data as your patients use your website. 

  2. Install the Segment snippet on your website. Copy and paste the snippet from the overview page into the <head> tag of your site. 

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    Note: Sunshine Health is a fictitious name and bears no resemblance to any customer or company.

  3. Implement event tracking. To start, you’ll want to define and collect all events, and their properties, that will help trigger the appropriate care treatment journey for your patients. For example:

    1. When a user registers, you will want to collect and assign a trait that specifies if the user has consented to receiving care messages.  

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    2. When lab results, for say HbA1C, are available you will want to collect the “Lab Result” events with Lab Result Categorization attribute to specify if the lab results are normal (signifying healthy patient), abnormal (signifying pre-diabetic) and critical (signifying diabetic).  

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Segment Journeys is HIPAA eligible and can be configured to securely store and process PHI/PII data. Please refer to Architecting for HIPAA to understand best practices and limitations for the storage and processing of PHI.

Step 2: Create a journey and define entry criteria

Here, we’ll use Segment’s visual builder to design an omni-channel journey based on the events and traits gathered above. 

  1. Create a Journey in your Segment Workspace, by clicking on Personas, Journeys, in the left navigation bar.

  2. Click on Create Journey.

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  3. Complete the form and click on Build Journey.

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  4. For this Journey's entry condition in our example, we are targeting only patients who have received a recent lab result and who have consented to receiving care treatment messages. Click on Add Entry Condition and configure the entry as:

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  5. Click Save in the top right corner.

Step 3: Design personalization based on patient’s health condition

  1. Next, you may want to group patients by their health conditions. You can do this by splitting them into 3 branches based on their condition category.

  2. Click on the plus sign and select Create a multi-branch split.

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  3. Then click on the plus sign under each split and click on Add a condition.

  4. For patients with a normal condition category, you’ll want to schedule them for an annual lab test.

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  5. For patients with an abnormal condition category, you may want to tell them how best to manage their condition and encourage them to schedule a visit with their provider.

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  6. For patients with a critical condition category, you may want to tell to immediately schedule a visit with their provider as well as offering up educational and next step materials.

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  7. At the end it would look like this:

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Step 4: Re-engage based on real-time interactions

  1. Next, you can create the care journey with the following conditions:

    1. For patients with an abnormal condition category, you may want to remind them to schedule a follow up visit with their provider. If after 7 days the patient has not scheduled a follow up visit, you can send an additional reminder. 

    2. For patients with the critical condition category, you may want to send a message urging them to schedule a follow up visit with their provider as soon a possible. If after 24 hours the patient has not scheduled a follow up visit, you can alert your patient care team so they can call the patient directly and help facilitate a provider visit.

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  2. At the end your complete journey will look like:

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Wrapping up

As a recap, here’s what we’ve done in this recipe:

  1. Implemented event tracking to track user behavior on your website

  2. Created a care delivery journey for your patients with personalization and re-engagement at scale

Are you ready to build and deliver personalized care at scale? Get in touch with a member of the team to schedule a demo today.

Getting started is easy

Start connecting your data with Segment.