“Welcome home.” It’s a saying as old as time. For me, it conjures up an image of my mother waiting to greet me at the front door with a smile and a hug after school. Don’t get me wrong. I did not grow up in a Norman Rockwell painting. Far from it. But I did have indelible experiences that, to this day, trigger feelings of comfort and familiarity. “Welcome home, sweetie” is as warm and wonderful as any phrase I recall.

Every language, every culture, has an expression to convey “Welcome home.” Across them all, the message is the same: “I know you. You know me.”

At every threshold where people reconnect, a welcome message strengthens the bond. In clinical practice, I always greeted my patients by their names—first name if familiar, “Mr.” or “Mrs.” if they were my parents’ age or older. I also reminded them of something they told me at our last visit. “Hello, Debbie. How did the trip to your niece’s high school graduation go?” This is not a formula. It is a ritual. The ritual, just like “Welcome home, sweetie,” marks the primal experience of connection. I know you. You know me. The ritual reestablishes our bond.

Empathy and ritual should be part-and-parcel of any eHealth program design. When users log on, the experience should trigger a feeling of familiarity. Users should see themselves reflected on the screen. It is the electronic equivalent to a “Welcome Home” mat (minus, of course, a hug from mom).

Personalizing the digital doorway begins with listening to users. At Healthwise, we interview target audiences, such as people with coronary artery disease (CAD), and ask open-ended questions. We then comb the interviews to extract and group users’ common feelings, beliefs, and tasks … a process known as mental modeling. These models give birth to individual personas, such as “Anxious Andy.” Andy is a composite of people newly diagnosed with heart disease who reported feeling loss of control and worry, as well as high motivation to heal their hearts.

In our CAD digital doorway, different personas are ready to greet the end user. Users will see themselves in a persona, whether they are newly diagnosed and activated, like Andy, or have a chronic problem and have let their heart health slip to the back of their minds over time (“Backburner Bobby”). Each persona is a tailored welcome mat, saying: I know you. You know me.

We welcome the user home. How we greet people is evolving because of new media. But the greeting, and the desire it creates to walk across the threshold, is as old as time.

In Part 3 of “Bridging the Digital Divide,” I’ll talk about one of today’s great debates on health education: Will computers replace health coaches?