Patient Journey Mapping is a simple concept – simply put it is the identification and visualization of all the processes and interactions that a patient has with their healthcare provider or the healthcare system as a whole during their care journey.

But why has it gained importance in recent years?

Importance of Patient Journey Mapping

The healthcare industry is an industry that is intrinsically linked with its customer, the patient. While this is not unusual for any customer-facing industry, it can be particularly noted in the field of healthcare. But despite this, over the past few decades healthcare has come to be dominated by institutional complexes where the patient, or customer, has taken an increasingly passive role.

This is why even though the field of medicine has witnessed increasing costs when it comes to costs borne by patients for treatments and remedies, there has been no corresponding increase in patient outcomes or even patient satisfaction in hospitals.

Patient journey mapping, borrowing from the principles developed by customer journey mapping and user journey mapping by business and software developers, seeks to once again shift the healthcare landscape into one which is patient-centric.

By mapping all the touchpoints of a patient with the healthcare provider and the healthcare system, it is easier for healthcare providers to understand the patient’s perspective during their entire care journey. This allows providers to identify potential pain points and eliminate discongruence between what the patient and the provider believe the stages of care to be.

What are the components of a patient’s journey?

Since the number of touchpoints and potential interactions that a patient has can quickly become overwhelming, the patient’s journey is divided into more discrete parts to focus on each one separately. These interactions can be physical or digital, something which is increasingly seen in a post-pandemic world due to the rapid digitization of healthcare services.

The patient’s care journey can broadly be divided into three categories; pre-visit, visit, and post-visit. Pre-visit touchpoints include all the interactions that a patient can have before making an actual visit to the healthcare facility. As evidenced by research, the patient’s psychosocial state can greatly influence Patient-Reported Outcomes Measures (PROMs) and the patient’s mindset is thought to be one of these factors. Pre-visit has a great priming influence on a patient’s mind and thus is of significant importance.

Some pre-visit touchpoints include:
● Searching for the correct healthcare provider to treat their ailment/injury
● Researching their provider
● Scheduling appointments
● Check-in at medical facilities

During the visit, the patient usually has the most touchpoints and processes to complete during the care journey. The visit portion of the journey is easily the most important, with the greatest importance on the patient’s satisfaction.

Some touchpoints during a patient’s visit include:
● Waiting for appointment
● Consultation
● Undergoing medical tests/exams
● Pre and post-procedure monitoring

Post-visit touchpoints and processes are the bookend of a patient’s journey, and can often reinforce or mitigate both positive and negative patient experiences. The post-visit touchpoints also represent the most lack of clarity over where the healthcare journey exactly ends. Mapping can often help providers understand what exactly patients may be expected of them post-visit.

Some post-visit touchpoints include:
● Being discharged from the hospital
● Receiving post-care instructions
● Follow-ups

Efficacy of Journey Mapping

The entire goal of journey mapping is to create a patient-centric healthcare experience. As evidenced by recent research, patients tend to report much higher outcome measures as well as satisfaction with their healthcare experience when healthcare providers are using mapping techniques.

While CJM is already proven to be an effective tool for business, recent and upcoming research has shown that the benefits of customer mapping are not limited to only a few industries and fields. Medical journey mapping has been identified as one of the ways that healthcare can take a more holistic approach toward medicine and treatment, thus improving the outcomes and experiences for patients.

By smoothening roadblocks, and identifying sticking points healthcare providers can reduce the friction that patients have during their healthcare journey. But additionally, providers were also able to identify barriers to providing better care to patients during their journey as a result of careful journey mapping. Journey mapping is also potentially of paramount importance in several schools of medicine like palliative care, pediatric care, oncological treatments, and others.

The introduction of healthcare KPIs (key performance indicators) to assess the quality of care given to patients during the ‘visit’ portion of their journey has also been noted as an improvement over previous systems.

The future may see the increasing use of AI, data analytics, and big data to significantly ease the pressure of mapping patient healthcare journeys. This would further allow healthcare providers to improve patient satisfaction in hospitals.

@ BraveLabs

BraveLabs is an agency that is custom crafting digital marketing solutions for pharma healthcare industries to help healthcare providers become better accustomed to a patient-centric transformation of the industry. With tools like Patient Journey Management, we are helping healthcare providers drastically improve patient experiences, helping providers to increase retention and acquisition.