Patient Journeys are a relatively new concept introduced to the healthcare industry as it transitioned into becoming a service-based industry with a focus on patient experiences. Implementing them in a healthcare business can lead to several cascading benefits.

Introduction

Healthcare businesses today are doing all that they can, or at least they should be, to improve patient experiences. But with modern patient care journeys starting far before any visit to the premises and ending much further after leaving the hospital, it can be hard for businesses to know what are all the factors that have a role to play in a patient’s experience.

Borrowing the process of customer journey mapping from other industries and segments, the healthcare industry has started the exercise of mapping and visualizing all the interactions that a patient has through their care journey.

What is the Patient Journey?

The patient journey, or their care journey, is the entire continuum of care that a patient experiences when starting to interact with a healthcare provider for an ailment, disease, etc. While the patient journey in this definition may seem similar to patient experiences, the key difference is that patient experience measures a patient’s perception while a patient journey only compiles the interactions.

These interactions are often visualized in a process called patient journey mapping. These visualizations can take various shapes and forms like theographs, flowcharts, mind maps, and other graphical representations.

These visualizations make it easier for healthcare businesses to comprehend and use the data that they collect on their patient journeys.

“Journey mapping is a process that provides a holistic view of the customer experience by uncovering moments of both frustration and delight throughout a series of interactions. Done successfully, it reveals opportunities to address customers’ pain points, alleviate fragmentation, and, ultimately, create a better experience for your users.” ~ Nielsen

What benefits does it have?

Through patient journey mapping, healthcare businesses are able to better understand all the interactions that a patient would have in their care journey. Healthcare organizations are able to compile, measure and visualize the gamut of interactions that a patient has. This allows them to more accurately understand the patient’s perspective during the healthcare journey and, more importantly, take notice of the interactions that have been flying under the radar.

Since patient experience is often a responsibility that providers believe is shared across either physicians and nurses, CEOs, or the entire healthcare chain, mapping patient journeys allows healthcare organizations to have a top-down, high-level, comprehensive picture of patient experiences. This allows organizations to set up the needed accountability in their healthcare process where patient experiences are carefully monitored.

Most healthcare organizations widely overestimate the level of patient experience they provide. Through the inclusion of business processes like patient journey mapping, in addition to proper strategic frameworks to improve patient experiences, healthcare organizations are able to reduce the gap between what they think they are providing and what the patient actually perceives the experience to be.

By visualizing the interactions that a patient has during their care journey, healthcare organizations also significantly improve their patient customer service. Organizations can identify and then smoothen roadblocks through journey mapping.

By reducing friction points, patients have better experiences and patient customer service improves as a result. Shortened wait times, reduced costs (in the long term), and better support are some of the known benefits.

Journey mapping is also potentially of paramount importance in several schools of medicine like palliative care, pediatric care, oncological treatments, and others where patient customer service is tantamount to the overall care quality.

Patient Experiences ( Prophet/GE Healthcare Camden Group 2016 Survey

While using tools like patient journey mapping to improve patient experiences does lead to a jump in costs for healthcare businesses it also leads to a high significantly higher increase in revenue.

How to map it?

The patient journey map is made out of various stages, phases, actors, and personas. All of these components of a journey map make it easier to visualize the interactions between providers and customers while also making it easier to understand what role the interactions have to play in the wider care model of a business.

The patient journey is firstly divided into three portions depending on the current position of the patient on their care journey. These categories are pre-visit, visit, and post-visit.

It is also important to see how the stakeholders in the journey interact with each other to get a cross-functional understanding of the entire care journey through multiple perspectives.

Stakeholders in a patient journey include:

A patient journey map can provide innumerable details about a patient’s care journey in a variety of manners, and allows a comprehensive look at what happens during the care journey.

Conclusion

Patient journey mapping today is a critical process that healthcare businesses need to be integrating into the care models. Without the presence of tools like journey mapping, healthcare businesses aren’t able to improve patient experiences to the fullest degree, leaving them behind the curve.

BraveLabs is helping healthcare and pharma organizations with marketing and business solutions like patient journey management. Contact BraveLabs to start integrating processes like patient journey mapping into your healthcare business.