The Case for Context- Why Personalized Education Needs To Go Deeper

We tak a lot about "personalized patient education" in healthcare tech. But here's something that's been nagging at me: are we really personalizing, or are we just customizing?

There's a difference—and it matters more than you might think.

The Current State of "Personalization"

Right now, most digital patient education works like this: A patient gets diagnosed with diabetes, so they receive diabetes content. Someone has surgery, they get post-op instructions. Maybe their name appears at the top of the email. We call this personalized.

But is it, really?

Compare that to what happens when a clinician sits down to educate their patient. They're not just thinking about the diagnosis—they're considering the latest lab work, how the patient has responded to medications, what other conditions they're managing, whether they've engaged with previous care instructions. They're weaving together dozens of data points to decide how to teach this particular person about their condition.

That's the kind of personalization we should be aiming for in digital patient education. And honestly, I think we're closer to making it happen than most people realize.

What If Patient Education Could Support Clinicians Better?

Here's the interesting part: all that clinical context already exists. It's sitting in EHR systems—lab results, medication lists, visit notes, trends over time. Clinicians use this information to determine how to educate each patient effectively.

So why don't digital education platforms have access to the same context?

This is the question that's been driving some of our recent thinking at Iris. What would it look like if patient education platforms could tap directly into EHR data—not to make clinical decisions, but to better extend what clinicians are already teaching?

Imagine a diabetes patient whose educational content automatically reinforces what their doctor discussed, tailored to their most recent HbA1c. Or post-surgical instructions that emphasize what matters most based on their specific healing progress. Or medication education that addresses the actual regimen the physician prescribed, not just generic information.

This isn't about replacing clinical judgment—it's about amplifying the clinician's educational reach with the same context they used when counseling the patient.

The Questions Worth Wrestling With

Of course, this raises some real challenges. How do you keep patient data secure when it's flowing between systems? How do you ensure that context-aware educational content stays within its lane—supporting what clinicians teach rather than offering clinical recommendations? How do you maintain the quality and trustworthiness that makes patient education actually useful?

These are good questions. Important ones. But they're also solvable—healthcare tech has been tackling similar problems around data exchange and clinical validation for years now.

The bigger question, in my mind, is whether we're being ambitious enough about what patient education can be as a physician extender.

Why We're Exploring This at Iris

At Iris, we built our platform around a specific idea: that you can digitize how expert clinicians educate their patients. Not their diagnostic reasoning or treatment decisions, but the way they communicate complex medical information—the prioritization, the analogies they use, the way they adapt their teaching to what each patient needs to understand.

We've gotten pretty good at that. But we've also hit a limitation.

Even the most sophisticated educational approach falls short when it's working with incomplete information. A cardiologist educating a heart failure patient considers their ejection fraction, their med list, their symptoms before deciding what to emphasize in the conversation. The education is shaped by clinical context, even though the context itself isn't the message.

That's why we're actively exploring partnerships that would enable deeper EHR integration. We're having conversations with companies that specialize in pulling clinical data from EHRs and making it accessible to other platforms in real-time.

This isn't about Iris becoming a diagnostic tool or making treatment recommendations. It's about enabling Iris to be a better teaching tool—one that can reinforce and extend clinician education with the same clinical awareness that informed the original conversation.

What This Could Mean

I'll be honest: we're in exploratory territory here. We don't have all the answers yet about exactly how this will impact comprehension, adherence, or patient engagement.

But we have a strong hypothesis: that patient education informed by clinical context will be meaningfully better at extending what clinicians teach than education based on diagnosis alone. That patients will engage more when the content they receive feels like a natural continuation of what their doctor discussed—because it was shaped by the same information their doctor was looking at.

The technical pieces are coming together. The EHR integration capabilities exist. The frameworks for ensuring education stays educational (rather than clinical) are clear. The question now is execution.

Moving Forward

Over the coming months, we'll be sharing more about how this develops—what we're learning, what challenges we're navigating, and ultimately, what results we're seeing.

Because at the end of the day, this is about closing a gap that shouldn't exist: the gap between the clinical context clinicians use when they educate and the context available to digital education platforms that extend their teaching.

If we can close that gap, we can build something that genuinely amplifies what clinicians do best—helping patients understand and engage with their care. Not replacing the physician's role, but making their educational impact reach further and last longer.

That's the opportunity we're chasing. And honestly? I think we're just getting started.

Iris Health AI is exploring partnerships for EHR-integrated patient education. If you're working in health data interoperability or patient engagement, let's talk about what's possible.