To offer the absolute best medical remedies, many healthcare suppliers and directors lately have began to depend on affected person personas.
By grouping collectively sufferers with related traits — comparable to their medical diagnoses, wants, preferences and behaviors — medical doctors plan higher general care at hospitals and different medical services. Then, after zeroing in on one affected person’s traits and issues, they map out a person healthcare journey.
Personas have been credited with revolutionizing the supply of patient-centered care, which permits folks extra enter into their very own well being administration. Industrial and programs engineers who concentrate on enhancing healthcare and affected person outcomes see them as a robust instrument, and two graduate college students at Binghamton University have strategies for making them more practical.
In research recently published in the Journal of Healthcare Risk Management, Jhanille Hurde and Amaya McCollough ’25 from the Thomas J. Watson College of Engineering and Applied Science’s School of Systems Science and Industrial Engineering analyze using personas and the way it may help sufferers in addition to the healthcare system as a complete.
“In healthcare, or in any industry, there are a lot of personas. With job roles, you have the manager, you have the supervisor, you have the crew member — each person has a persona,” Hurde stated. “As a patient, you have your own persona. Even if you have breast cancer and somebody else has breast cancer, you are two different personas, because you need different treatments and different interventions.”
This semester, Hurde is ending her grasp’s diploma whereas working on the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York City by the Watson Institute for Systems Excellence (WISE), which embeds college students in trade to conduct real-world analysis.
Hurde’s advisor, SSIE Assistant Professor Sreenath Chalil Madathil, stated researching personas and associated healthcare monitoring can enhance affected person outcomes and system efficiency.
“Patient journey mapping serves as a critical foundation for healthcare systems engineering, enabling evidence-based optimization of care delivery by capturing real patient needs and experiences,” Madathil stated. “Using dynamic patient personas, engineers can identify problems in processes, enhance workflows and effectively utilize AI-driven predictive analytics.”
During her analysis on personas, Hurde found that few healthcare suppliers have a normal option to gather and format the data, which makes it troublesome to collate and examine information. That lack of standardization can result in biases when amassing the fabric, and it hampers efforts to use synthetic intelligence to foretell higher outcomes.
“We need to have more dynamic patient personas in this new age that we’re in, using technology to do predictive analytics, or using machine learning and AI to help us along that journey,” she stated. “We use those tools every day, and we use them a lot in healthcare, so why not use them to serve our patients?”
Through her work at MSK, Hurde is aware of the significance of understanding not simply sufferers’ medical wants, but additionally their psychological and social well-being.
“If you’re creating new technologies, like a heart rate monitor, who are you tailoring those devices for?” she stated. “Is it meant for a cardiac patient who needs reliable at-home arrhythmia detection, or someone just tracking fitness? Different personas, different needs.”
McCollough earned her bachelor’s diploma in ISE from Binghamton earlier this 12 months and works as an affiliate engineer for the power firm Avangrid. She is also incomes her grasp’s diploma by the SSIE School’s Executive Program in Health Systems taught in Manhattan.
Her function within the analysis concerned working with Hurde to search out supporting proof and to double-check conclusions — however that proved to be more difficult than they initially thought.
“A lack of published research about personas made doing the review a little harder, because there wasn’t as much information regarding them,” she stated. “Few people are publishing anything about their application. That makes it hard to connect what I’m doing right now with topics like enterprise systems, which deals with customer relations, resource planning and supply-chain management.”
Hurde and McCollough agree that the main focus of their analysis is on sufferers, however enhancing assortment and implementation of personas may clear up “pain points” within the healthcare system general, comparable to delays in care, hospital admissions or discharges. Redesigning workflows for optimum effectivity requires as a lot information as attainable.
“There’s a disconnect with almost all the research where people did the work, and the work is good — but where is it being applied in the real world right now?” Hurde stated. “There’s no documentation or research being put out to see how it’s being used. What are the outcomes? What are the benefits? That was a real shock to me.”
SUNY Distinguished Professor and Director of the SSIE School Mohammad T. Khasawneh appreciates the contemporary concepts that pupil researchers deliver to the healthcare dialogue.
“Improving healthcare systems has been a long-time goal for WISE,” he stated. “We are proud of what Jhanille and Amaya have accomplished with this research, and we look forward to seeing where their future careers take them.”