Exploring a patient’s journey through a healthcare system allows healthcare businesses to understand exactly what a patient experiences. Understanding the experiences patients have is the first step in making those experiences better.

Introduction

Patient journeys are a relatively new development in the healthcare industry. The concept started gaining momentum only around a decade ago. But it was brought towards mainstream adoption by larger healthcare organizations only a few years ago.

However, even in that short period, a wide body of research has developed around the area. Research has shown that patient journey mapping has a plethora of cascading benefits on the entire healthcare industry.

Today, patient journey mapping has emerged as a critical tool for healthcare businesses to understand and shape patient experiences in healthcare. Read more to understand just how patient journeys in hospital settings can impact patient experiences.

What is patient experience?

Patient experience healthcare has been defined in multiple ways but a standard consistent definition has not yet emerged. But all stakeholders broadly agree that patient experience can be loosely defined as the sum of all the interactions of a patient during the duration of care. The interactions that a patient experiences are not just physical ones but emotional and mental as well.

“Patient experience is about managing both the emotional and physical roller-coaster a patient experiences while undergoing a healthcare procedure and about maximizing the patient’s social, mental, and physical health and wellness” – BR Needham

But perhaps the simplest definition is that the patient experience is how a patient feels at the end of the care journey. While simplistic, this definition allows healthcare businesses to understand what exactly patient experience is aiming to measure.

Research over the past decade has underlined the various benefits that increasing patient experiences can have not just for patients but for the healthcare providers themselves.

Patient experience best practices include measures like improving engagement with patients, promoting prevention, improving communication, and creating patient-focused systems.

Progress on these methods can be hard to measure without the appropriate tools in many healthcare settings.

What is the patient journey?

A patient’s journey may sound like a similar concept to a patient experience if we go by definitions alone. Usually defined as the visualization of the cross-functional interactions of a patient during the entirety of their healthcare journey. 

However, patient journey, also known as patient journey mapping, is a business process for the healthcare industry. It allows healthcare businesses to understand and provide top-level information about the entire continuum of care which includes all the interactions between a patient and their healthcare provider. 

Patient journey allows healthcare businesses to provide more efficient and increased quality of healthcare service to their patients. Research has highlighted the countless benefits that patient journey mapping provides to the entire process in a healthcare business. 

As the patient is the only individual who undergoes the entire journey, through every single step, patient journey mapping is a crucial step for healthcare businesses to understand how their discrete processes and steps integrate.  

Healthcare businesses significantly improve the quality of the service by exploring and understanding the individual patient journey.

How does one affect the other?

While patient experience is an important metric for a healthcare business to keep track of, it is at the same time deceptively hard to measure. Traditionally, tools like surveys, questionnaires, and feedback forms have been used in the past to measure patient experience.

But the issue with such tools is that they often are unable to grasp the complete sphere of a patient’s experience in a healthcare setting. Since a care journey is an extremely multi-faceted process in itself, the interactions that shape a patients’ experience are many and frequent.

Some of these interactions may even escape the attention of healthcare businesses.

By using patient journey processes, healthcare businesses can thoroughly map out all the interactions that patients will have in their journey. This process allows them to recognize what interactions had been flying under the radar and what impact they have on the experience.

More importantly, it allows healthcare businesses to understand the patients’ involvement and observation of what happens to them and around them.

Where to improve the patient experience using patient journeys

Organizations need to be constantly trying to improve patient experience, as it ties into patient satisfaction which is a critical metric of success for the healthcare business. Patient satisfaction in hospital settings is a measure of the success that any healthcare business has, and while not the same as the patient experience, it is highly influenced by the same. But the path to improvement lies in understanding what steps need to be taken to achieve those results.

Patient journey mapping provides exactly this insight and information to healthcare businesses. By exploring patient journeys, healthcare providers can view their organizations’ healthcare processes through the same lens as a patient, instead of the provider perspective that they possess.

Healthcare organizations can build their services around the real needs of their patients apart from just recovering or getting healthier than they had been when they entered the care journey.

To improve cross-functional hospital processes, executives and managers in healthcare settings need to understand the importance of patient journey mapping and build it into their practices.

Conclusion

The body of research surrounding the importance of patient journey mapping, patient experience, and the implementation and integration of both is growing every day. But while there is mounting evidence about the importance of these processes and practices, authoritative guidance on implementing these in a healthcare setting has been much more sparse.

BraveLabs can provide your business with deep insights, and expert strategy and execute the plan to help improve patient experiences using patient journey mapping as a tool. By collaborating with BraveLabs, your healthcare business will get to deliver improved patient outcomes and see significant business growth.