Operationalising personalisation in a healthcare system

The balance of power is shifting away from traditional institutions into the hands of individuals. A top priority for every hospital leadership team is the need to provide a much more personalised experience for two primary constituencies: leaders and staff (internal) and patients, including members of the broader communities served (external). Personalisation is seeing and treating people as individuals, whether those people are patients or staff. It is achieved when people know they matter. Operationalising personalisation is the act of adapting the way an organisation functions to make it more likely that both internal and external constituencies at all levels build the skills and have the tools to see and treat people as individuals. Many barriers to personalisation exist within organisational cultures that are designed, instead, for standardisation; however, there is a methodical approach to identifying and overcoming those barriers and to creating an environment where people know they matter as individuals. One private, not-for-profit clinical research centre, hospital and graduate school embarked on this approach, examined organisational systems over a year, identified actions to take and behaviours to change, and improved their personalisation readiness scores across four categories by 17, 21, 32 and 32 percentage points. The experiences of this organisation give other organisations a blueprint to follow in their own pursuits of operationalising personalisation across the enterprise.