Mapping patient journeys can seem to be a complex endeavor for many healthcare businesses but is a crucial tool that is necessary to grow the healthcare business. Patient journey mapping allows businesses to improve patient experience and satisfaction in their healthcare models.
Introduction
What is the Patient Journey Mapping?
What benefits does it have?
Stages of a patient journey
Conclusion
Introduction
Patient journey mapping is a process for healthcare businesses to visualize and identify all the potential interactions that a patient has in their care journey. Patient journey is not exactly a new concept but it is new to the healthcare industry. Based on models of customer journey mapping for other service industries and businesses, the healthcare industry has in recent years come to realize the importance of journey mapping.
Journey mapping is being used by businesses to identify how customers and potential customers are interacting with their business. Companies can then improve their customer experiences by understanding and improving each step in the customer’s journey, often fixing unseen flaws and pitfalls.
And now the healthcare industry is using it for much the same reasons, for enhancing patient experience. Though patient journey mapping can seem to be complex, and in some aspects it is complex, healthcare businesses need to understand its importance for their bottom line.
What is the Patient Journey Mapping?
The patient journey is the entire continuum of care that a patient experiences when starting to interact with a healthcare provider for an ailment, disease, etc. These experiences are cross-functional and involve multiple areas of a healthcare business. Every single unit of these experiences is known as an interaction.
The visualization of these experiences and interactions is known as patient journey mapping. These visualizations are presented through various graphical representations like theographs, flowcharts, mind maps, and more. 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 way to start with the customer first and work back from there. Every journey will be different but understanding it at a more granular level and working backward to improve that experience will differentiate your organization against competitors.” ~ Accenture
What benefits does it have?
A healthcare SWOT analysis is an essential tool for healthcare organizations to under not only the strategic situation of their marketing strategy but also their business as a whole.
Focusing on the marketing aspect of SWOT analysis, healthcare businesses are able to identify key issues in their marketing strategies. This includes the areas that are working well but also the areas that are not working as well as expected in the strengths and weaknesses categories. Since these categories are internal factors, it is easier for healthcare businesses to identify what can be easily changed in such situations to better the results.
Through the analysis of threats and opportunities, businesses are also able to identify key developments and factors that are present in the business environment like the healthcare industry as a whole and wider national or regional factors.
This allows them to mold their marketing strategies accordingly and thus improve upon existing marketing strategies, or completely overhaul them as needed. Conducting a SWOT analysis for your business’ healthcare marketing strategies should be done at least once every 6 months, if not more often.
Healthcare and healthcare marketing are always shifting and transforming, and knowing where one’s strengths and weaknesses lie are important tools to becoming better.
Patient Satisfaction with their Healthcare Experience (Prophet and GE Healthcare
Camden Group 2016 Survey)
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 visualize the gamut of interactions that a patient has. 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. Through careful collection and analysis of this data, healthcare businesses finally have an actionable way of improving patient experiences in their healthcare business.
For healthcare organizations, there is often a large gap between the level of patient experience they provide and what they think they are providing. Through the inclusion of business processes like patient journey mapping healthcare organizations are able to reduce the gap between what they think they are providing and what the patient actually perceives.
Stages of a patient journey
The number of touchpoints and potential interactions that a patient can have is immense. This is why the patient’s journey is divided into more discrete parts to focus on each one separately. The patient’s care journey can broadly be divided into three-phase; pre-visit, visit, and post-visit.
Pre-visit interactions include all the interactions that a patient can have before making an actual visit to the healthcare facility. Pre-visit interactions often seem unimportant but actually have a great role in the patient establishing trust and confidence in the healthcare system.
Examples of pre-visit interactions:
Patient has the most amount of interactions during their visit to a healthcare facility. The visit portion of the journey is often subdivided into further categories to make it easier to comprehend. Due to sheer numbers, visit interactions have the most scope for improvement
Examples of visit interactions:
Post-visit interactions extend far beyond just the exit from a healthcare facility. Healthcare businesses often need to follow up on patients to ensure high levels of satisfaction.
Examples of post-visit interactions:
Conclusion
Patient journey mapping is an essential process for healthcare businesses today. Without implementing and integrating patient journey mapping in their healthcare models, businesses are unable to fully capitalize on their efforts to improve patient experiences.
BraveLabs is providing healthcare businesses the expertise they need to uncomplicate patient journey mapping in their healthcare models. Through BraveLabs’ patient journey management service, journey mapping can become simpler for every healthcare business.
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