Healthcare Leaders: Personalization Is When People Know They Matter

Dr. Donna Hicks, associate at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard University, is an expert in human dignity and a specialist in conflict resolution. In her book Dignity, she identified a major obstacle in human relationships: “our failure to recognize how vulnerable humans are to being treated as if they didn't matter.” This vulnerability is what personalization aims to acknowledge and address.
Personalization is seeing and treating people as individuals, whether those people are patients or staff.Operationalizzing personalization is the act of adapting the way a hospital or hospital system functions to make it more likely that people will have the mindset and tools to see and treat people as individuals.