Individualized interventions and precision health: Lessons learned from a systematic review and implications for analytics‐driven geriatric research

Abstract Older adults are characterized by profound clinical heterogeneity. When designing and delivering interventions, there exist multiple approaches to account for heterogeneity. We present the results of a systematic review of data‐driven, personalized interventions in older adults, which serves as a use case to distinguish the conceptual and methodologic differences between individualized intervention delivery and precision health‐derived interventions. We define individualized interventions as those where all participants received the same parent intervention, modified on a case‐by‐case basis and using an evidence‐based protocol, supplemented by clinical judgment as appropriate, while precision health‐derived interventions are those that tailor care to individuals whereby the strategy for how to tailor care was determined through data‐driven, precision health analytics. We discuss how their integration may offer new opportunities for analytics‐based geriatric medicine that accommodates individual heterogeneity but allows for more flexible and resource‐efficient population‐level scaling.