Enhancing audience segmentation with Adobe Real-Time Customer Data Platform.

Staying competitive in healthcare means delivering personalised digital experiences that meet rising patient expectations. Consumers want seamless interactions, timely outreach and services tailored to their needs — but many organisations struggle to connect fragmented data while maintaining strict privacy compliance.

In this guide, learn how to boost patient engagement, respond to the growing demand for personalised healthcare services and see how Adobe Real-Time Customer Data Platform (CDP) helps unify data, enhance audience segmentation and improve the overall patient experience — all while supporting HIPAA compliance.

In this guide:

• Healthcare consumers expect personalised experiences.
• The cure — Adobe Real-Time CDP.
• Ensure HIPAA compliance with Real-Time CDP.
• Understanding patient engagement with unified data.
• How Adobe Customer Journey Orchestration helps you personalise digital experiences.
• How Adobe Customer Journey Analytics empowers healthcare organisations.

Patients and other healthcare customers are tired of one-size-fits-all experiences. Over half of surveyed consumers said they’re open to using their personal data to manage chronic conditions, get tailored health insights or receive personalised product and insurance recommendations.

This growing expectation for relevance and customisation goes hand in hand with a shift toward digital engagement. Deloitte found that 65% of healthcare consumers prefer virtual appointments and communication over in-person visits.

According to the CDC, 58.5% of adults use the Internet to search for health or medical information, with women doing so more often than men. Adults ages 30 to 44 are the most likely overall to communicate with healthcare providers digitally (47.7%).

These trends highlight the need for healthcare organisations to deliver timely, informative and personalised content across digital channels — an effort that depends on accurate, real-time data and effective audience segmentation.

Healthcare consumers also expect a wide range of digital and in-person experiences beyond what anyone could have imagined before the pandemic. They want telehealth providers to know their history as well as the doctor they see in their local clinic. They want to be reminded of future appointments and relevant tests. And they want to stop repeating their health histories and filling in paper forms.

Most healthcare companies can’t meet these expectations yet. They're unable to combine their customer data from multiple online and off-line sources into meaningful profiles while complying with HIPAA and other privacy rules. Adobe recognises this enormous need for the industry and that’s why we launched Adobe Real-Time CDP as the first piece of Adobe Experience Cloud for healthcare.

Delivering consistent, personalised experiences across web, mobile, email, call centres and in-person interactions requires a unified view of each patient — and that starts with data. For instance, when patients search online for flu symptoms, they can be automatically served timely, relevant information about nearby clinics, vaccine availability or follow-up care without compromising data privacy.

Real-Time CDP makes this level of personalisation possible by gathering customer data from virtually any source. It collects experience data from client-side platforms like websites and mobile apps in real time and seamlessly ingests data from third-party systems such as CRMs, marketing automation tools and electronic health records.

Once collected, Real-Time CDP centralises and standardises this information to create a dynamic, unified profile of each patient. These profiles are continuously updated and shared across Adobe and non-Adobe systems in seconds — ensuring every customer-facing touchpoint has the latest, most complete view of the individual’s history and needs at every stage of their healthcare journey.

For healthcare organisations, Real-Time CDP is designed to ensure that all data is collected and stored in a manner that complies with HIPAA. It can easily identify and secure personally identifiable information and protected health information — information that relates to someone’s past, present or future health state — and apply access rules, so you can feel confident all your customer data is being handled in a compliant, ethical way.

Real-Time CDP can transform your organisation’s ability to deliver high-quality, personalised experiences to patients, insurers and others. Once you understand how your customers interact with your business, what they prioritise and where they encounter challenges, you’re in a much better position to deliver highly relevant experiences.

Healthcare companies are using Real-Time CDP to:

• Inform personalised experiences and offers. Real-Time CDP immediately updates profile data and makes it available to customer-facing systems that determine which content and offers are the best fit with what each customer wants at any given moment.
• Get a complete view of the customer journey. Real-Time CDP gives you a 360-degree view of how customers interact with your organisation across all channels. It can help you to identify — and address — bottlenecks that make it harder for customers to get what they need, such as overly complex forms that make customers fill in data your organisation already has.
• Uncover valuable customer insights. Real-Time CDP can fuel analyses powered by artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning that uncover patterns in customer behaviour. These patterns can help to predict when customers are likely to buy new healthcare products or services — and when they’re likely to change providers. With this kind of intelligence, healthcare providers can offer experiences and interventions to address customers’ future needs proactively.

Consumers now expect the same level of convenience and personalisation from their healthcare providers that they get from retailers, banks and streaming services — especially when it comes to managing care online. Convenience and cost are two primary reasons many patients prefer virtual visits over in-person appointments. But for many organisations, delivering a seamless digital experience remains a challenge. Patients are often left navigating disconnected platforms, receiving generic communications and struggling to access their health information.

To improve engagement, healthcare organisations must go beyond transactional touchpoints and create connected, personalised experiences that span digital and in-person care. With a strong data foundation and integrations between health records, billing systems, provider platforms and pharmacy networks, hospitals and clinics can streamline everything from scheduling and insurance verification to answering patient questions more efficiently. For patients, that means seamless access across devices and appointments, test results and other health information in one convenient place.

The right technology can make possible this. Real-Time CDP unifies patient data in real time, helping healthcare brands deliver relevant content, proactive outreach and self-service tools tailored to each individual. It also connects data across health records, websites, apps and other touchpoints to provide a smooth, consistent experience — whether someone is scheduling a telehealth visit or checking lab results. Some organisations are already embracing this digital transformation.

Mercy Health, one of the five largest US health systems, was keenly aware of the friction most patients experienced online. Before its digital transformation, Mercy had a website that covered the basics, like searching for a provider and offering contact information. However, the online experience was the same for everyone and didn’t compare to the individualised attention patients received during in-person office visits.

Mercy wanted to change that. Their team of digital marketers set an ambitious goal — to build a measurable, ubiquitous, one-to-one experience across their digital presence, emerging channels and physical spaces. Using Adobe solutions, Mercy Health transformed its website. Now, patients can pay their bills on mercy.net as well as schedule appointments, view lab results and access self-service information. They also receive personalised content and follow-up reminders, made possible by customer profiles that connect data from digital platforms and medical office systems.

While healthcare organisations are investing in digital tools, many still struggle to create truly personalised experiences. One major barrier is passive patient engagement. When patients don’t regularly update their information or interact with digital systems, it becomes difficult for providers to build complete, up to date profiles. This lack of accurate data can affect everything from recommended treatment plans to proactive outreach and follow-up care.

For example, patients are often hesitant to actively manage or update their electronic health records due to privacy concerns — especially when it comes to sensitive topics like mental health, sexual health or chronic conditions. Studies have also shown that patients are less likely to engage with their medical data when the tools are difficult or unpleasant to use or when their healthcare providers don’t encourage or support the process. Yet the benefits are significant. Actively engaging patients in maintaining their records can help to fill in gaps between visits, flag emerging concerns earlier and save valuable time during in-person appointments by reducing the need to repeat information.

This is where Adobe Customer Journey Orchestration is especially valuable. Combined with Real-Time CDP, healthcare providers can dynamically respond to patient behaviour and preferences as they happen. As events occur — like a patient scheduling a follow-up or reading about a condition on a provider’s website — data is captured and analysed to assess where the patient is in their journey. These insights help set the conditions for the next best action, whether it’s a personalised content recommendation, a care reminder or a tailored message via email or SMS.

By orchestrating journeys based on real-time data and behavioural context, healthcare organisations can move away from generic outreach and toward personalised digital healthcare experiences. It also improves audience segmentation by continuously updating and refining patient profiles based on the latest interactions so that every message, alert or recommendation is relevant, timely and aligned with individual health goals.

To meet rising consumer expectations, healthcare providers must unify patient data from online and off-line sources to build complete, actionable profiles while maintaining strict HIPAA compliance. That’s where Adobe Customer Journey Analytics comes in.

Customer Journey Analytics helps healthcare organisations uncover the “why” behind patient behaviours. Its flexible data framework simplifies the integration of diverse datasets — from appointment scheduling and electronic health records to websites, mobile apps and call centres — into a single, unified view. Built-in governance and customisable permissions protect patient privacy at every step, giving providers the confidence to act on insights responsibly.

Deliver personalised health experiences to every patient.

Healthcare brands should look beyond surface-level metrics and understand the full context of each patient journey. Combined with Real-Time CDP and Journey Orchestration, Customer Journey Analytics is a powerful tool for delivering connected, personalised experiences that drive better outcomes, strengthen trust and meet the demand for real-time engagement.