Patient Journey Mapping: A key tool for improving patient experience and retention

The global pandemic certainly accelerated the shift to digital healthcare. According to Deloitte, back in 2011, investment in health tech was about $1.1 billion; in 2019, it was $7.4 billion and jumped to a staggering $14 billion in 2020.

Patient experience has seen some of the biggest changes, where traditional healthcare providers (HCPs) face challenges against digital-first HCPs.

According to one study, “HCPs that discover and apply customer insights are 5x more likely to grow revenue.

Tellingly, patients see their app and associated communication experience as a reflection of their care team, leading to high engagement with digital experiences. For example, push notifications earned reaction rates upwards of 40% for HCPs in another study — over 30% higher than average reaction rates.

The patient journey

Today’s healthcare consumers are unique — they are flush with care options and motivated to conduct extensive research before selecting a care provider. Patients deal with a very high stakes commodity — their health — so it’s extremely important for HCPs to understand the patient journey, not only for their own benefit but to ensure patient retention.

Ultimately, the goal of this process is to help people address their health problems faster so they can continue enjoying a full life. The question is where to meet them in this journey, and the answer is found in patient journey mapping.

What is a patient journey?

A patient journey is a term referring to a patient’s experience throughout an episode of care, beginning at admission and concluding with hospital discharge. The renewed focus on patient experience in recent years stems from growing trends in healthcare consumerization and value-based care initiatives.

By understanding the patient journey, providers can build a hyper-targeted experience that addresses the unique needs of each patient and delivers more successful patient outcomes. Improved patient experiences can also save providers money — for example, by reducing the average time to diagnosis.

Since health systems tend to be large and, in some cases, disjointed, the patient journey from initial outreach to continued care is rarely a perfectly seamless experience. It can be easy for seemingly minor details or points of contact to be forgotten.

Patient journey maps reveal these inconsistencies and gaps that are detrimental to both the patient and the health system. The cross-functional team of marketers, business development professionals, operations, etc. can come up with actionable solutions to fill these gaps (often with automated solutions), keeping more patients engaged and improving overall satisfaction.

What is patient journey mapping?

Patient journey mapping — also called healthcare process mapping — is an exercise that healthcare leaders use to better understand how patients interact with a hospital or health system throughout their care journey.

Patient journey mapping helps stakeholders to assess the patient experience from multiple perspectives. Journey maps provide a way to visualize the internal and external factors affecting patient flow and the different paths patients must take in order to reach their care goals.

Patient journey map

A patient journey map is a visual tool that illustrates the relationship a patient has with a healthcare organization over time. It outlines all of the patient touch points during each stage of interaction and aids in the creation of strategic outreach that improves both patient engagement and satisfaction.

When done correctly, patient journey maps make it easier for you to identify pain points, discover opportunities, and re-align treatment and care approaches across the entire healthcare system.

Patient process mapping techniques

Process mapping techniques can be used to create a visual representation of the patient’s journey. Using process mapping tools enables everyone involved in the different steps of the journey to see the overall picture of patient care and understand how complicated the journey can be for patients.

It also indicates how well the processes of care are working — giving people the opportunity to reflect on the way they work, diagnose any problems in the pathway and identify areas for improvement.

Process mapping also promotes ownership of the steps in the patient journey, creates team building and helps to increase staff involvement in design and redesign of the processes involved.

Mapping processes is a very empowering tool when it is undertaken by the staff who work the processes — the people who really know how things work. The approach prompts good ideas and exposes frustrating problems. This helps teams to know where to start to make improvements that will have the biggest impact for patients, carers and staff.

Mapping tools can help you to:

• identify points of inefficiency and duplication
• highlight any bottlenecks or constraints that slow down the flow of the patient journey
• identify the unhelpful variation in patient journeys that you need to minimize

Mapping reveals every facet of interaction that takes place over the course of the patient’s relationship with the health system, including appointment reminders, phone calls with admitting staff, prescription reminders, physical care, and with the right analytics even points in the clinical journey that happen out-of-network.

The 6 stages in the patient journey

1. Pre-visit awareness — The patient self-assesses his or her symptoms, conducts research, considers potential health conditions that may require treatment
2. Initial contact — The patient makes initial contact with a health system
3. Care — The patient is assessed at a medical facility
4. Treatment — The health system provides the patient with both on-site and follow-up care
5. Post-visit behavioral & lifestyle change — The patient makes changes to daily routines and takes part in proactive healing in order to reduce readmissions and promote long-term wellbeing.
6. Ongoing care & proactive health — The patient manages his or her care between clinical visits; meanwhile, the health system fosters engagement between the patient and physician in order to enable the patient to address symptoms and maintain good health.

The patient retention phase is a crucial part of the patient journey that is often forgotten after a patient receives treatment.

• Getting feedback is necessary so you can gather insights into patient experiences and satisfaction
• The patient’s input can then be used to improve patient journey mapping, which ultimately helps to improve the patient experience, quality of care and process efficiency

Benefits of patient journey mapping

No healthcare worker can know all the processes and people involved in a patient journey. It is important to map the journey and use the insight gained to test out service changes. Changes are often made based on assumptions and gut reactions rather than facts.

Patient journey mapping can offer the following benefits to health systems if they spend time to thoroughly understand the process:

• Create personalized experiences for each patient by deeply understanding their needs and preferences
• Better understanding of patient experiences throughout each stage of interaction with the health system
• Expose gaps and opportunities for improving communication between patients and their care providers
• Unlock opportunities to improve pre-and post-clinical patient engagement through timely, targeted outreach efforts and boost retention rates by reinforcing long-term patient relationships
• Keep up with shifting market forces to ensure high rates of patient acquisition and retention
• Provide seamless, continuous care for patients. There are often gaps in the patient journey because of poorly coordinated technology and resources
• Reduce pain points by spotting problems with ease

Patient journey mapping tools

PowerPoint presentations are a common way to share information, but for busy pharmaceutical or healthcare industry professionals, they can be time-consuming to create and quickly out of date.

A connected collection of digital and dynamic data-driven Patient Journey Maps will help ensure that the information is accurate and up-to-date, allowing for better treatment information when it comes to patient care.

1 in 5 HCO leaders says “their organization can’t keep up with the volume, velocity, and variety of data.” The top concerns HCOs had about health care data were the number of metrics they needed to track (34%), privacy concerns (33%), and the speed of new data flowing in (32%). None of these problems will be going away on their own. HCOs concerned about their healthcare data should invest in a data platform that can keep up with new data, find relevant insights, and keep privacy secure.

Many organizations are collecting data and creating diagrams manually in PowerPoint or other presentation tools to present their findings (clinical trial information and market population for their product) to leadership. This is time-consuming and results in an inconsistency of documentation.

Benefits of Patient Journey Mapping Tools

• Accurately capturing information
• Using a standardized form to capture the required information from users ensures a strong and complete data set.
• Increase productivity
• Enable teams to focus more on their patients and treatment development rather than spending time creating PowerPoints.
• Align multi-disciplinary treatment efforts
• Leadership has a live feed of what is happening for treatments or trials and multiple stakeholders are aligned in one place.
• Identify efficiencies and inefficiencies in the process
• Fully understand the process flow with an interactive patient journey map. Aggregate and explore your data in a variety of ways, with different views and filters.

By using this solution, Pharmaceutical Companies and Hospital Networks can improve the accuracy of their data sharing, they can better manage patients and understand the treatments they are on, and make better decisions about treatments and clinical trials.