Patient Archetypes and Personalized Care

We believe that to best help patients live better with their disease, a more personalized and precise approach to healthcare is greatly needed. 

We can begin by digging deep to examine how patient beliefs impact their health attitudes, self-efficacy, and expectations for care. 

Each patient sitting in the doctor’s office holds a collection of his/her own beliefs that are related to his/her own condition and self-efficacy. We can organize these collections of beliefs into archetypes to explore and understand which treatment approaches may be best for each patient archetype.

Patient archetypes may be categorized in a few ways, including medical complexity/frailty, severe relapsing condition, convergence of medical/social/behavioral issues, and diagnostic uncertainty.

Each of these patient archetypes may respond better to a specific approach to patient care.

For example, patients fitting the profile of a severe relapsing condition, such as multiple sclerosis or addiction, may believe they need to be more “in control” of the disease. Patients who have this archetype likely have a chronic or persistent disease that could potentially interfere with their lives on a day-to-day basis.

Patients of this type may show greater improvement if they are involved in disease management decisions, and might want to proactively do what they can to minimize the disruptiveness of the disease on their own lifestyle. By collaboratively working with the healthcare team, these patients will improve their quality of life while receiving the timely care needed for their condition.

BeliefMap^TM can help your team to better understand patient archetypes in your market and to explore how you can deliver more precise and personalized care to patients.

Ready to discover how you can drive change in your market? Request a demo of BeliefMap^TM today to learn more.

Source: Vaillancourt S, Shahin I, Aggarwal P, et al. Using archetypes to design services for high users of healthcare. Healthc Pap. 2014;14(2):37-41; discussion 58-60.