Tailored Messages

Case study

Why we started Tailored Messages: A precision health communication platform

Tailored Messages, a platform that helps health systems and community organizations deliver research-backed, culturally and contextually tailored communication at scale.

Problem & Opportunity

Health organizations were already sending messages to patients and community members, but results are inconsistent. Generic broadcast content feel impersonal, have low engagement, and often failed to change behavior. Teams that tried manual personalization couldn't scale beyond small cohorts, and rule-based templates break down in complex, real-world situations where context matters.

Users & Use Cases

Tailored Messages serves multiple stakeholders. We designed for the needs of end recipients and the teams responsible for content, compliance, and outcomes.

  • Primary users: patients, caregivers, and community members receiving messages.
  • Secondary users: care managers, health educators, advocacy teams, and program owners.
  • Admin stakeholders: compliance leaders and clinical reviewers who require auditability.

Tailoring mattered most at moments of friction: screening invitations, appointment preparation, medication adherence, post-discharge support, and community outreach during high-risk periods. These are the points where generic messaging breaks trust and leads to drop-off.

Product Goals & Success Metrics

We framed success across three layers so the product would create value beyond vanity metrics.

  • Business goals: partner adoption, paid renewals, and measurable value for clinical programs.
  • User goals: higher trust, clearer next steps, and increased confidence to take action.
  • Program outcomes: improvements in completion rates, adherence, and follow-through.

We track engagement (open and response rates), and define success by downstream actions such as completed screenings, attended visits, reduced no-shows, demonstrable compliance readiness, and staff time saved.

Solution & Product Strategy

We anchored the product around three layers: a marketplace of training modules with subscriptions, a campaign engine that generates unique access links and sends messages, and an embedded delivery experience that tracks progress and supports tenant branding. This kept the system modular while still delivering a full end-to-end workflow.

At a system level, a module subscription unlocks campaigns. A campaign creates recipients, generates a trackingId plus accessToken, and builds secure access URLs. Delivery supports email, SMS, or both, with reminders and quotas. Once a recipient opens the link, the module is embedded via an iframe wrapper that passes branding and content configuration through postMessage and saves progress back to the platform.

  • Access vs. security: we chose secure, tokenized links so recipients could start without a login, while still protecting access.
  • Scale vs. control: we invested in reusable templates and variable substitution to personalize at scale without custom code.
  • Insights vs. noise: we verify delivery via webhooks to keep campaign metrics reliable.

The strategy emphasized operational reliability: module configuration is tenant-specific, delivery is multi-channel, and progress is captured in a consistent schema. This lets partners scale evidence-based programs while still seeing what is working at the module and campaign level.

Execution & Iteration

The MVP focused on the core loop: subscribe to a module, create a campaign, send access links, and track completion. That meant building the marketplace catalog, subscription checks, campaign creation, and the intervention experience before optimizing analytics or automation.

Iteration added the pieces operators needed to run at scale: template management with system defaults, variable substitution, scheduled launches, reminders, and multi-channel delivery. We then wired in webhook-based tracking so delivery, opens, access, and completion could roll up into dashboards and module analytics.

Privacy, safety, and accuracy shaped the implementation. We used tokenized access links, unsubscribe handling, verified webhook signatures, and sandboxed module iframes. These constraints influenced how quickly we could ship, but they kept the platform deployable in real health settings.

Impact & Outcomes

Our most concrete outcomes are from the ORRS evaluation, a randomized clinical effectiveness trial with 773 community participants across three U.S. states. It is the clearest proof point of how Tailored Messages translates evidence-based content into measurable behavior and confidence gains. Read the ORRS case study.

  • Statistically significant gains in knowledge of overdose signs and overdose management.
  • Higher self-efficacy and response efficacy for responding to overdose events.
  • Lower concern about intervening and reduced personal stigma toward overdoses.
  • Stronger intentions to administer intranasal naloxone and respond to emergencies.

The outcomes validate the product approach: when tailored content, secure access, and progress tracking work together, programs can move both knowledge and confidence in the right direction.

Key Learnings & Insights

Building AI-enabled health products changed how we think about personalization. Relevance is only half the equation; trust is the multiplier. If people don't believe the message is safe or accurate, they ignore it regardless of how well it is tailored.

We also learned that scalability comes from governance, not just automation. The content registry, evidence tags, and approval gates were as important as the personalization engine. They gave clinical partners confidence and unlocked deployment at scale.

Finally, the work reinforced a core principle: personalization is a product system, not a feature. It requires data integrity, policy guardrails, content operations, and a measurement framework that ties messaging to outcomes. That mindset now shapes how we evaluate new AI and health product opportunities.