Patient Journey Mapping is the first step for healthcare businesses to understand the complete perspective of patients during their care journey, setting the stage for introducing interventions that result in a higher quality of healthcare services.

Introduction

The healthcare industry looks incredibly different today than it was just 50 years ago. Today’s customers, not just patients, are empowered to ask for more than just the bare minimum treatment in healthcare settings. The US adult on average spends nearly $10,000 a year on their healthcare, far higher than the global average, and consequently expects a quality of service that would be far from such expenses.

For healthcare businesses today, just making the patient better is no longer enough. Overall experiences of the patient play a vital factor in their satisfaction, and thus also vital for a business’s bottom line.

When it comes to expectations, patients today have two major expectations when coming to a healthcare practice; 1) they receive the best quality of care for their ailment, 2) they have at the very least good experience during their care continuum.

For healthcare businesses, making these improvements are not so easy. It is hard to understand what exactly went wrong in a patient’s care to only make it “adequate” or why they didn’t have the best experience. Without diagnosing the problem, it’s hard to find a solution for it.

This is why Patient Journey Mapping (PJM) is quickly emerging as a critical process and tool for modern healthcare businesses. Through PJM, healthcare providers not only improve the quality of their care but also improve patient experiences.

Benefits of PJM

Patient Journey Mapping, or PJM in order to avoid a mouthful, is a novel process that visualizes the entirety of a patient’s journey in a healthcare setting. All their interactions from start to finish are visualized for easier analysis.

Journey Mapping is a novel concept for the healthcare industry but not one for other industries like mobile app development, sales, retail, and others. Countless papers have established the effectiveness of journey mapping as a business process.

Though research in PJM, in particular, has also highlighted the benefits of the practice in a healthcare setting. Through PJM, healthcare businesses are able to essentially understand the perspective of their customers and patients when interacting with the business. This allows businesses to first compile all the interactions or events that a patient undergoes in a healthcare setting. After compiling the interactions, healthcare businesses are able to quickly identify pain points and understand the necessary changes that need to be made to fix the pitfalls.

By using PJM healthcare businesses are able to:

1. Improve communication channels between providers and patients

2. Understand the pain points faced by patients

3. Support patients after primary treatment

4. Breakdown healthcare silos to streamline the workflow in a care setting

How PJM leads to quality healthcare

Quality of healthcare refers to the quantifiable value attached to the care provided to a patient through the likelihood of better health outcomes being increased. The higher the quality of care, the higher the likelihood that a patient receives the desired treatment outcome.

As the World Health Organization puts it – “Quality of care is the degree to which health services for individuals and populations increase the likelihood of desired health outcomes. It is based on evidence-based professional knowledge and is critical for achieving universal health coverage.”

In order for care to be quality, it needs to fulfill some criteria. Care should be:

• Timely: Care given should be without delays and without unnecessary waiting times.

• Equitable: Care should be accessible to all without restriction on gender, race, ethnicity, etc.

• Integrated: Care should be integrated with all of the different services that are present in a healthcare system.

• Efficient: Care should avoid wastage of resources and use available ones efficiently

Quality healthcare also needs to be:

1. Effective

2. Safe

3. Patient-centric

Through PJM healthcare businesses are able to create healthcare systems where timely care is provided in an effective and safe manner. This healthcare system integrates various healthcare silos and breaks down any barriers to equitable healthcare. Through PJM, healthcare businesses can identify the issues that need to be addressed in their healthcare setting in order to make it a truly patient-centric experience for its customers.

PJM is an essential tool for enhancing patient experiences. By using PJM, the quality of healthcare is much easier to achieve due to there being identifiable quantities that can be worked upon. Issues once recognized can be targeted with interventions. Patient experience best practices can be integrated into the various care systems of a facility.

Conclusion

Patient Journey Mapping is one of the key processes available to healthcare businesses today through which they improve healthcare experiences. Constantly looking for ways to improve the delivery of healthcare to patients and improving their experience has emerged as one of the only ways to retain competitive parity with other healthcare businesses in the US.

PJM allows healthcare providers to keep patient-centric care as the focus and design interventions around that key focus, resulting in significant benefits for the entire business.

BraveLabs is aiding healthcare businesses of all sizes to implement patient journey mapping in their healthcare models.