Journal of biomedical informatics
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Over the last decades there has been an increasing interest in personalization: can we make sure that treatments are effective for individual patients? The quest for personalization affects biomedical informatics in two ways: first, we design systems-for example eHealth applications-that directly interact with patients and these systems might themselves one day be personalized. Hence, we seek effective methods to do so. ⋯ By clearly defining personalization and analyzing the effectiveness of different personalization methods this discussion highlights how we should embrace sequential experimentation-as opposed to the traditional randomized trial-if we want to personalize our informatics systems efficiently. Furthermore, we need to make sure that we capture the treatment assignment process in our health records: doing so will greatly increase the utility of the collected data for future personalization attempts.