Tailored Healthcare: Two Perspectives on the Development and Use of Patient Profiles

Calls for a more tailored approach to the management of cardiometabolic and musculoskeletal diseases have been increasing. Although tailored care is a centuries-old concept, it is still unclear how it should be best practised. The current paper introduces two phenotype-based Dutch approaches to support tailored care. One approach focuses on patients with type 2 diabetes, the other on patients undergoing total joint replacement. Using the patient profiling approach, both projects propose that care can be tailored by the assessment of biopsychosocial patient characteristics, stratification of patients into subgroups of patients with similar care needs, abilities, and preferences (so-called patient profiles) and tailoring of care in concordance with the common care preferences of these profiles. In this article, the advantages and disadvantages of the method are discussed to enable researchers or clinicians who want to extend the patient profiling approach to other patient populations to carefully evaluate these in relation to their project’s focus and available resources.