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Your complete guide to patient journey mapping.

15 min read Healthcare organizations can increase patient retention and improve patient satisfaction with patient journey mapping. Discover how to create a patient journey map and how you can use it to improve your organization’s bottom line.

What is the patient journey?

The patient journey is the sequence of events that begins when a patient first develops a need for care. Rather than focusing on service delivery, the patient journey encompasses all touchpoints of a patient’s healthcare experience–from locating healthcare providers and scheduling appointments, to paying the bill and continuing their care after treatment.

Examining the patient journey is essential to improving the patient experience. Not all interactions a patient has with your organization are weighted the same. Gathering patient feedback and understanding perceptions all along the patient journey can help you to identify moments of truth : the touchpoints that have the biggest impact on patient loyalty.

Download eBook: The 3 steps to driving human-centered healthcare experiences

The patient journey vs. the patient experience

Unlike traditional patient experience measurement, the patient journey looks not only at service delivery but also at the steps the patient takes before and after they engage directly with your organization. It recognizes that patient interactions with a healthcare system go well beyond the walls of the medical facility itself.

What are the stages of the patient journey?

There are several stages along the patient journey. When gathering patient feedback, you should make sure to capture insights at each of these stages.

Stage 1: Awareness

The patient journey starts with awareness. In this stage, the patient identifies a need for care and begins searching for care providers. Examples of how patients learn about healthcare providers include online searches, review sites, marketing campaigns, networking, and community involvement.

Stage 2: Consideration

In the consideration stage, the patient weighs their options to determine if your health system can meet their needs. Factors patients consider include referrals, coverage and benefits, recommendations, access, and ratings and reviews. Often in this stage, patients interact with your website or social media pages or contact you via phone or email during this stage.

Stage 3: Access

The access stage is where the patient decides to schedule services with your healthcare organization. Direct patient engagement with your organization increases during this stage. You’ll engage with patients in a variety of ways including phone calls, the patient portal, text messages, and emails as part of the scheduling and new patient acquisition process.

Stage 4: Service delivery

The service delivery stage relates to the clinical care provided to your patients. Encompassed in this stage are the clinical visit itself, check-in and check-out, admission and discharge, and billing. Traditional patient satisfaction measurement centers around this stage of the patient journey.

Stage 5: Ongoing care

The ongoing care stage of the patient journey involves patient engagement that occurs after the interactions directly related to service delivery. In addition to wellness and care management, this stage may address social determinants of health and population health.

What is a patient journey map?

The best way to utilize the patient journey to enhance patient experiences is by journey mapping. A patient journey map is a visual tool that illustrates the relationship a patient has with a healthcare organization over time.

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.

What are the benefits of patient journey mapping?

Patient journey mapping can help you to visualize all of the steps patients take throughout the entire process of seeking, receiving, and continuing care. Creating a patient journey map is useful to identify pain points and gaps in care. Mapping the patient journey makes it easier to develop solutions that make a more seamless experience within your healthcare system.

Patient journey mapping benefits include:

• Creating shared ownership of the patient experience
• Refining your patient listening strategy
• Aligning your organization with a common view of the patient experience
• Measuring gaps between the intended experience for your patients versus the actual experience
• Identifying and resolving common pain points for your patients

Four types of patient journey maps

When creating a patient journey map, there are four types to consider. Each type of map has an intended purpose. You might start your patient journey mapping with only one type and incorporate the others as your efforts progress.

Current state

A current state journey map tells the story of what patients do, think, and feel as they interact with your organization today. This type of patient journey map is ideally created using patient data and observational data.

The current state journey map is best for driving incremental improvements to enhance the patient experience.

Future state

A future state patient journey map tells the story of what you want your patients to do, think, and feel as they interact with your organization in the future. This type of map should capture the ideal journey you’d like to see for your patients.

The future state journey map is an effective tool to drive strategy, align teams, and communicate your visions for new services, processes, and experiences.

Day in the life

A day in the life patient journey map illustrates what your patients do, think, and feel today, within a specific area of focus. Patient personas are particularly useful when creating day in the life maps; these are discussed in greater detail below.

This type of patient journey map is intended to capture what your patients experience both inside and outside of the healthcare system. Day in the life maps are valuable to address unmet needs and determine how and when you can better engage your patients.

Service blueprint

A service blueprint is a simplified diagram of a current state or future state patient journey map. In the service blueprint, you add layers to illustrate the systems of people, processes, policies, and technologies surrounding each patient touchpoint.

For current state patient journey maps, the service blueprint can help to identify root causes of pain points. For future state, the service blueprint is helpful to visualize the systems or processes that can be put in place to support the intended patient experience.

How do you create a patient journey map?

Now that you know about the different types of patient journey maps and their roles in driving patient experience improvement, how do you get started on creating your own?

The most useful maps are those which can expound upon each touchpoint of the healthcare journey with operational data, such as patient demographics, as well as real patient insights and perspectives. Using a platform that can capture this data will aid significantly in your patient journey mapping process.

Patient journey mapping: getting started

Before you get started, it’s a good idea to engage individuals across all departments and include input from multiple stakeholders. Once you’re ready, follow these steps to begin creating an effective patient journey map.

Identify your target audience

What type of patient journey will you be mapping? There may be varying patient journeys within your organization; for instance, an oncology patient’s journey will look very different from that of an expectant mother. The journey of a patient with health insurance will differ from that of a patient without insurance. To map the patient journey, you’ll want to create robust patient profiles you can use to segment and track like-populations throughout the healthcare experience.

Establishing patient personas and segments

Not every patient will have the same healthcare goals. Creating patient personas based on behaviors and preferences is a good way to differentiate the needs and more clearly understand the perspectives of the unique populations you serve.

The ideal patient persona will include the following information.

• Demographic information such as age group, gender, or location
• Healthcare-specific goals, conditions, and treatments
• Healthcare-specific challenges/pain points
• Engagement patterns and expressed feedback
• How your services fit into their life
• Barriers to care

Specify a goal for the patient’s journey

The patient personas you create will all have unique goals within the care journey. The patient has a specific goal in mind when they initiate contact with your organization, whether it is treatment of symptoms, a diagnosis for chronic issues, or surgery.

Every interaction along the patient journey influences how successful the patient feels about achieving this goal. When mapping the patient journey, you’ll want to consider how the various touchpoints affect the patient’s ability to meet this goal.

Identify the patient’s steps to accomplish their target goal

This step is about how the patient views their care journey within your health system–not about the actual processes and systems your organization has in place. Effective patient journey mapping requires you to see how the patient navigates the journey through their point of view.

Omni-channel listening is a valuable strategy in this step of journey mapping. Listening to your patients across all the channels can provide a clearer picture of their perceptions and behaviors as they engage with your organization.

Some steps the patient takes may not even include your organization, but might still affect how they are interacting with you directly. For example, if a patient logs into their health insurance portal to check coverage for healthcare services, they are not engaging with your organization but this is still a part of their care journey that may feed into their interactions with your organization later on.

Uncover perceptions along the journey

Gather patient feedback along the touchpoints of the care journey to identify key emotional moments that may disproportionately shape attitudes. These insights shed light on what’s working and what’s not; they can also be used to highlight the moments of truth that contribute to patient loyalty.

Patient perceptions are an important piece of patient journey mapping; it will be difficult to drive action without them.

Additional tips for creating the ideal patient journey map

Patient journey mapping is a continuous process. Creating the map is the first step, but the true value is dependent upon maintaining the map as you continue to gather insights and refine processes.

This leads to the second tip: be ready to take action! You can use a patient journey map to draw conclusions about your patients’ experiences within your organization, but awareness alone will yield no benefits. The journey map is a valuable tool to be used in your wider improvement efforts.

How do you drive action using a patient journey map?

Once your patient journey mapping is complete, it’s time to put it to good use. Here are five ways patient journey maps can be used to drive action.

Identify and fix problems

The visual layout of a journey map makes it ideal to identify gaps and potential pain points in your patient journeys. This will give you a better understanding of what’s working and what’s not. It will also help you to visualize where and how improvements can be made.

Build a patient mindset

Patient journey mapping enables you to incorporate more patient-centric thinking into your processes and systems. Use your map to challenge internal ideas of what patients want or need. Invite stakeholders to navigate the touchpoints along the healthcare journey to gain perspective.

Uncover unmet patient needs

By mapping the patient journey, you can build stronger patient relationships by listening across all channels to determine where experiences are falling short or where unmet needs emerge. This enables you to look for opportunities to expand alternatives, streamline initiatives, and create new, engaging ways for your patients to share feedback.

Create strategic alignment

Utilize your patient journey map to prioritize projects or improvement efforts. It can also help you to better engage interdepartmental staff to better understand policies and work together toward patient experience goals.

Refine measurement

Patient journey mapping is a great resource to use when defining patient satisfaction metrics and identifying gaps in how you currently gather insights.

How does patient journey mapping increase your bottom line?

Patient journey mapping can increase your bottom line by laying the foundation for improved patient satisfaction and higher retention.

Organizations across all industries are looking to understand customer journeys in order to attract and retain customers by gaining deeper insights into what drives the consumer experience.

As healthcare becomes more consumer-driven, health systems must similarly map the patient journey to improve the patient experience and boost retention. The cost of patient acquisition, combined with the fact that patients are willing to shop around for the best healthcare experience, means success depends on creating the most seamless patient journey possible.

The tools for success

For the most impactful patient journey mapping experience, you’ll want the ability to link your operational and experience data to your journey map’s touchpoints. Insights about what has happened at each touchpoint, as well as why it is happening, empower you to create experiences that meet patient expectations and drive up satisfaction.

Here are some best practice considerations as you develop your patient journey mapping strategy:

• Create a shared understanding throughout your health system of how your patients interact with your organization, and you’ll know the roles and responsibilities of your different teams
• Design a unique patient journey based on multichannel, real-time feedback from the patient
• Consider the frequency with which topics emerge in feedback, as well as the emotional intensity behind them to zero in on what improvements can drive the greatest impact
• Develop empathy and collaboration between teams, working together to achieve the same outcome
• Drive a patient-centric culture by developing a shared sense of ownership of the patient experience
• Connect your operational patient data with your patient experience feedback in one system
• Leverage a closed-loop feedback system that triggers actions for immediate responses to patient concerns

Qualtrics’ XM Platform™ is designed to support all of these actions throughout the journey mapping process.

The 3 steps to driving human-centered healthcare experiences

Related resources

Patient feedback 15 min read, healthcare branding 13 min read, patient journey 10 min read, patient experience 12 min read, symptoms survey 10 min read, nurse satisfaction survey 11 min read, cahps surveys 6 min read, request demo.

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How and Why To Create Customer Journey Maps for Hospitals

Shawn Gross, chief digital strategist, healthcare practice lead, at White Rhino

“Great content marketing starts with understanding the customer’s journey,” says Shawn Gross, chief digital strategist, healthcare practice lead, at White Rhino .

“ Journey mapping has become a favorite marketing tool for visualizing the customer’s experience. But what exactly are journey maps, how do you create them, and what is the best way to apply them to hospital marketing?

“At first glance, a customer’s journey may seem pretty simple. You offer something, and the customer buys it. But once you get into the details, customer journeys are quite complex and come in many varieties.

“Your customers can come into contact with your organization in a multitude of ways and from many different starting points — marketing, referrals, search, social media, and customer service inquiries.

“No doubt you want to make every experience a customer has as good as it can possibly be. So to make sure no interaction slips through the cracks, we use journey mapping to create a visual representation of every experience your customers have with you. It helps to tell the story of a customer’s experience with your brand from awareness to hopefully a long-term relationship.”

This is important, says Gross, because “researching and selecting a hospital or doctor is an emotional decision, often filled with highs and lows of uncertainty and fear.”

In our new article, Gross discusses ways to use journey maps to better understand customers’ emotional drivers and psychological motivators. He’ll also explain how  Ochsner Health System used journey mapping to develop a content marketing strategy to attract customers and drive deeper patient engagement.

Read it now: The Science of Hospital Journey Mapping

Best regards, Matt Humphrey President

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Patient Journey Mapping: What it is, Benefits and 5 Steps to Do it

In the rapidly evolving landscape of healthcare, patient-centered care has emerged as a crucial paradigm shift. As hospitals strive to deliver exceptional patient experiences and improve outcomes, understanding the patient journey has become paramount. 

A customer journey map is a powerful tool that shares patients’ path from their first encounter with a healthcare facility to their final discharge. By visualizing this complex expedition, hospitals can gain invaluable insights into patient needs, pain points, and opportunities for enhancement, thereby revolutionizing the delivery of care. 

The following article delves into the significance of patient journey maps for hospitals and their importance in optimizing patient experiences, streamlining processes, and ultimately elevating the standard of healthcare.

What is a Patient Journey Map?

A patient journey is a methodology that enables the analysis of a healthcare provider’s processes and value chain but from the patient’s viewpoint. This includes their possible solutions, pain points, emotions, touchpoints and user actions throughout the journey.

The patient journey map employs visual representation to gain deeper insights into how patients engage with a healthcare facility throughout their care journey. This unique approach is an evolution of the customer journey map , tailored specifically to the healthcare context. By employing this method, healthcare providers can unravel the intricacies of patient interactions, uncovering valuable information to enhance the quality of care provided.

The concept of the Patient Journey Map mirrors that of the Customer Journey Map, seeking to uncover areas of enhancement in patient care across various healthcare providers, including hospitals, fertility centers, and more.

Just as a skilled cartographer carefully crafts a map to navigate uncharted territories, patient journey maps chart the course of a patient’s experience, revealing hidden insights, unveiling opportunities for improvement, and ultimately guiding healthcare providers toward a destination of unparalleled patient satisfaction . 

What are the benefits of implementing a Patient Journey Map?

Engaging in the patient journey proves immensely valuable as it enables us to provide patients with an optimal experience, meeting the very expectations that arise when seeking healthcare services. 

The emotional aspect tied to the Patient Journey Map can be profoundly impactful, considering the inherent uncertainties often associated with visiting a healthcare facility.

Considering the unique personalities, fears, behaviors, and attitudes of different patient archetypes play a pivotal role in creating a tailored and pleasant experience for them. Thus, the patient journey map becomes a valuable tool benefiting both patients and healthcare service providers.

● Enhanced Communication with Patients:

By understanding the patient journey, healthcare providers can establish effective and continuous communication throughout the entire care process, addressing any doubts or uncertainties. Keeping patients well-informed and updated through appropriate channels reinforces the quality of care provided.

● Elimination of Blind Spots:

Clear comprehension of each stage of the patient journey helps bridge the gaps between patients and services. From the initial appointment request to discharge and follow-up, identifying and addressing potential blind spots ensures consistent and satisfactory solutions tailored to each patient’s unique situation.

● Streamlined Resolution of Pain Points:

Mapping the patient journey and defining archetypes enables a deeper understanding of patient concerns, particularly identifying which aspects of the service have the most negative impact. Pain points such as waiting times, unclear explanations, lack of empathy, or impersonalized treatments can be simplified and resolved more effectively.

Learn About: Complaint Resolution

● Process Optimization:

A well-defined patient journey optimizes workflow and allows for more efficient handling of all processes. Staff members become better equipped to anticipate and address patient issues promptly, offering alternatives that instill confidence and satisfaction.

● Continuous Improvement:

Implementing a Patient Experience model involves measuring patient experiences through a feedback system . Continuously updating the database with relevant information about patient journeys and their experiences leads to ongoing improvement in response times, customer service processes, and overall service quality .

What is a Patient Persona?

The patient persona represents an imaginary profile that encapsulates potential patients’ needs, goals, illnesses, conditions, emotions, behaviors, and knowledge. 

By creating patient personas, healthcare providers can enhance the accuracy and anticipation of care and diagnosis processes, ultimately improving the experience of individuals seeking healthcare services.

5 Steps to Build Your Own Patient Journey Map

1. define the experience to map:.

Before diving into the Patient Journey Map, it is crucial to determine the specific experience you intend to outline. By establishing your objectives and identifying the type of information you seek to gather and how it will be utilized, you can ensure a more efficient mapping process right from the start.

2. Identify your Ideal Patient:

The majority of data used to construct the customer patient care journey will come directly from patient-clients. Thus, a key step is identifying the patient persona, which can be singular or multiple. You must decide whether the map will encompass various patient profiles or if separate maps will be created for each target patient.

To create the patient persona(s), gather feedback directly from patients and analyze their behaviors and data. Pose questions such as:

• What initially led the patient to seek your services?
• Which competitors did they research?
• How did they discover your website or company?
• What factors differentiated your brand from others? What influenced their decision (or lack thereof) to choose your services?
• What are their expectations when interacting with your company?
• Can they articulate what they appreciate about your company and what frustrates them?
• Have they ever contacted customer service? If so, how was their experience?

Once you have defined the patient persona(s), you can identify the distinct stages of the customer journey when engaging with your company.

3. Divide the Phases of the Customer Journey:

Throughout the customer-patient care journey, patient-clients progress through several discernible stages.

Phase #1: Pre-Visit

● DISCOVERY:

The patient journey initiates with a phase characterized by learning and concern. Patients embark on their healthcare journey upon recognizing a need or developing a concern related to a health issue.

For instance, if an individual experiences symptoms associated with being overweight, they may begin researching options for scheduling an appointment with a medical specialist. At this point, potential patients discover their specific needs and commence the process of investigating suitable solutions. They may turn to the internet, seek recommendations from friends and family, or explore other avenues. During this stage, it is recommended healthcare systems should provide educational support to aid individuals on their journey of understanding.

● CONSIDERATION:

Following their research, patients reach the consideration stage, having discovered your service. At this point, they possess some knowledge about your healthcare facility’s location and offerings, leading them to believe it could meet their needs. However, patients have also explored your competitors and are contemplating multiple options.

During the consideration stage, potential patients meticulously assess the information they come across, including service descriptions, pricing, contact pages, online inquiries, and reviews. They also evaluate the ease of accessing relevant information before scheduling an appointment and the availability of operating hours, among other factors.

Phase #3: Visit

● APPOINTMENT & ENGAGEMENT:

Having gathered sufficient information and progressed through the consideration phase, the patient ultimately chooses your service. This marks their first contact with the health center, which can occur in person, over the phone, via chat, email, or other means of communication.

During this stage, the patient schedules their appointment. The company must streamline the application process and maintain effective and proactive communication. It is crucial for this phase to be completed without complications.

● SERVICE DELIVERY:

Within the visit phase is the service delivery stage, where patients interact with various service providers at the health center. From the moment the patient enters the premises, the company must ensure an exceptional service experience.

Service delivery encompasses multiple micro-moments, necessitating comprehensive attention throughout the entire journey. Every interaction matters, from the reception care and waiting times to the core service itself—meeting the patient’s objective of being evaluated by a doctor or specialist.

Phase #3: After the Visit

● RETENTION:

The Patient journey doesn’t conclude after the initial visit. A crucial third phase occurs post-encounter, where efforts should be dedicated to fostering patient retention and encouraging their return for subsequent visits. Building strategies that monitor the patient experience is essential in designing loyalty programs to ensure patients return for future services.

● RECOMMENDATION:

Part of the post-visit phase involves patient recommendations, which heavily depend on the overall patient journey experience provided by the company. If patients have had a positive service encounter, they are likely to recommend it to others, benefiting your business. 

However, it is important to remember that negative experiences are equally shared, and if patients are dissatisfied, they may spread negative feedback. 

Promptly addressing any negative comments is crucial to resolving issues and preventing unfavorable recommendations.

Phase #4: Identify Touchpoints

An additional vital step in mapping the customer-patient care journey is identifying the various touchpoints between the patient and the healthcare facility. These interactions occur at different stages throughout the patient journey, and understanding these touchpoints aids in developing strategies that facilitate effective communication.

• Seeking information about healthcare centers: discovering the existence of the healthcare provider and the services it offers.

Investigation:

• Reviewing patient-client feedback: researching comments and feedback from other patients about their visit experiences at the health center.
• Exploring promotions: searching for economic benefits such as discounts, promotions, and bundled service packages.

Acquisition :

• Appointment Request: Contact or visit the health center to schedule an appointment.
• Provision of Personal Data: The health center will request personal information to finalize the appointment booking.
• Appointment Confirmation: After providing the required data, the appointment for the agreed date and time is confirmed.
• Patient Reception: The patient arrives at the health center at their scheduled appointment time.
• Waiting Room: The staff guides the patient to the designated waiting area.
• Consultation: The patient’s turn to be attended by the specialist.
• Payment: The process of settling the payment for the service, which may occur at any point during the service phase, depending on the health center’s policies.
• Patient Recommendations: Patients offer positive or negative feedback about the health center and its services.
• Loyalty Program: Incentives such as offers, promotions, discounts, or a points system to encourage future visits.

Recommendation:

• Complaint: If the patient has had a negative experience, they may file a complaint with the health center.
• Online Reviews: Patients share comments or criticisms about the service by posting reviews on the internet.

4. Identify Contact Channels

Patients engage with the health center through various channels throughout the patient journey. These channels, such as the health center itself, can be physical or online, including social media, email, applications, websites, and online forms.

Identifying the most utilized contact channels at each stage of the customer-patient care journey is crucial. This allows for the development of tailored strategies for each channel, meeting patient expectations at each phase.

Working on the patient journey is crucial for healthcare providers to deliver a high-quality experience to patients. By mapping their interactions, providers gain a deeper understanding of their patient personas, allowing them better to comprehend patient needs, desires, and circumstances to provide the desired care.

Patient Journey Map Example 

To better understand what a Patient Journey Map is, we have created this fictitious example using one of the most reputable medical institutions in the healthcare sector, the Massachusetts General Hospital, as a reference.

In this example, we have included some generic touchpoints that are usually the most common in the interaction between a hospital and a patient.

Through this example, it would be possible to visualize the points of interaction between both parties and the perception that patients have of them, which can be positive or negative. This serves as a clear indicator for making adjustments and learning from what has been done well.

The Office of Patient Experience plays a vital role in facilitating initiatives to assess and enhance the quality of care experienced by patients and their families. They are responsible for evaluating each of these touchpoints and ensuring that appropriate actions are taken.

The Mass General Hospital is a benchmark not only in terms of service level but also in the implementation of methodologies and actions that guarantee the satisfaction of their patients. A clear example of this can be seen in the results of their annual HCAHPS survey, where they score above the national average in various aspects.

Willingness to Recommend Hospital Scores below show the percentage of patients who would “definitely recommend” Mass General to their friends and family.

To see the complete study, we invite you to visit their website and learn about it.

More Examples of Patient Journey Maps

Seeking inspiration to craft your own Patient Journey Map? Your search ends here!

Explore a collection of remarkable examples from top-notch brands, unveiling their initiatives that delight customers and foster loyalty.

Get set to revolutionize your own Patient Journey!

Mass General Hospital is renowned for providing exceptional care and taking special care in understanding the perspective of its patients. They achieve this through different tools, such as satisfaction surveys, internal and external feedback, and  HCAHPS surveys .

Mayo Clinic is characterized by its focus on patient satisfaction and its extensive technical deployment to gather user and prospect feedback.

Cleveland Clinic is often ranked among the best hospitals in the United States. This recognition is not only due to its incredible facilities, global expansion, and well-prepared staff but also because of its remarkable focus on the experience they provide to its patients and clients.

Singapore General Hospital is one of the largest and oldest hospitals in Singapore. It has been a major healthcare institution providing a wide range of medical services and treatments since 1821.

Johns Hopkins Medicine has long recognized the significance of a positive patient and family experience during hospitalization, which is why they maintain a specific focus on  patient satisfaction  to achieve an optimal experience.

How can you enhance your Patient Journey Map based on your acquired knowledge?

The insights and recommendations shared above are likely to have sparked ideas about the potential impact of these initiatives across various industries, not just healthcare.

The first crucial step is to embrace a customer-centric approach, keeping their needs and expectations at the forefront. By doing so, the actions you take will have a meaningful impact on your customers and yield multiple benefits for your business.

At QuestionPro, we offer a range of tools and features specifically designed to help you achieve this objective.

QuestionPro SuiteCX is a Customer Journey Mapping Software that simplifies the process of creating your customer journey. 

With a vast selection of templates and the ability to personalize user/buyer personas while incorporating your own data, you can conduct precise visual analyses at every touchpoint throughout your patient journey.

Start delighting your customers today!

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Mapping the Patient’s Journey in Healthcare through Process Mining

Michael arias.

1 Department of Business Computer Science, Universidad de Costa Rica, San Ramón 111-4250, Costa Rica

2 Department of Clinical Laboratories, School of Medicine, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, Santiago 8320000, Chile; [email protected]

Santiago Aguirre

3 Department of Industrial Engineering, School of Engineering, Pontificia Universidad Javeriana, Bogotá 110231, Colombia; oc.ude.anairevaj@erriugas

Felipe Cornejo

4 Department of Computer Science, School of Engineering, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, Santiago 7820436, Chile; lc.cu@ojenrocaf (F.C.); lc.cu@numj (J.M.-G.); lc.cup.gni@socram (M.S.)

Jorge Munoz-Gama

Marcos sepúlveda, daniel capurro.

5 School of Computing and Information Systems, University of Melbourne, Victoria 3010, Australia; ua.ude.bleminu@orrupacd

Nowadays, assessing and improving customer experience has become a priority, and has emerged as a key differentiator for business and organizations worldwide. A customer journey (CJ) is a strategic tool, a map of the steps customers follow when engaging with a company or organization to obtain a product or service. The increase of the need to obtain knowledge about customers’ perceptions and feelings when interacting with participants, touchpoints, and channels through different stages of the customer life cycle. This study aims to describe the application of process mining techniques in healthcare as a tool to asses customer journeys. The appropriateness of the approach presented is illustrated through a case study of a key healthcare process. Results depict how a healthcare process can be mapped through the CJ components, and its analysis can serve to understand and improve the patient’s experience.

1. Introduction

Customer journey mapping (CJM) [ 1 ] is a well-known technique that focuses on assessing how customers interact with a company or organization. This allows the gain of a deeper knowledge about the customers’ perceptions, and becomes an essential tool to improve the overall customer experience (CX). This knowledge can be used to generate competitive advantage and satisfied customers [ 2 ]. Understanding each step required to complete a process (customer paths), and how customers interact with a company’s services throughout that journey are key aspects to assess customer needs, the ability to improve them, and the delivery of great products and services. During a journey, customers can interact with a company through different methods or channels (e.g., on-line, phone call, etc.), go through different stages, and face specific business context factors. Recently, companies in several industries embarked in a transformation to take advantage of the benefits of new digital technologies. This digital transformation may impact key business factors, customer relationships, as well as products, services and processes [ 3 ]. However, a primary limitation is that companies do not have enough knowledge about their customers or how their end-to-end processes look like [ 4 ].

Along with this digital transformation, and the data generated through digital interactions, two novel disciplines have emerged: process science and data science [ 5 ]. Process science combines knowledge from information technologies and management sciences, to run and improve operational processes (e.g., time or cost aspects) based on a model-driven perspective. Within this discipline, Business Process Management (BPM) [ 6 ]—a process-oriented discipline—can be used to enhance organizational processes, aiming to combine different approaches to execute the design, implementation, control, monitoring, and optimization of business processes. Data science seeks to turn data into real value (data-driven approach), by focusing on generating knowledge to improve processes from larger and smaller datasets [ 7 ].

As part of the process science discipline, there is an important data-oriented sub-discipline called process mining (PM), which can be used to enhance companies’ operational processes. The aim of PM is to extract knowledge about process execution from data stored in existing information systems [ 8 ]. This sub-discipline can be understood as a bridge between process science and data science. Process mining has been used in several industries including healthcare [ 9 ] and education [ 10 ], as well as in resource allocation or recommendations for business processes [ 11 ].

In healthcare, there is a particular interest in a correct and efficient execution of both clinical and business processes. However, it is widely known that healthcare processes are often challenging due to their complexity, dynamics, and sometimes owing to their ad-hoc nature and multiplicity of disciplines involved [ 12 ]. Hospitals usually embrace standards to ensure the quality of healthcare processes. As a consequence, the identification of typical and non-typical patient journeys, and the monitoring compliance (process deviations) with hospital policies and standards become a focus of interest. Disciplines such as process mining could be used to support those initiatives and provide valuable insights not only to improve our understanding of clinical processes, but also to influence their execution and efficiency [ 9 ].

In this paper, we use customer journey analysis as a method to map patients’ experience using process mining, which in turn guides the creation of key indicators to improve the patients’ satisfaction, based on multiple identified touchpoints during a specific healthcare process. We conduct a case study in which the CJM has been put into practice in two different scenarios based on an Emergency Room process.

2. Background

2.1. process mining in healthcare.

The provision of quality care to patients is the most relevant aspect in a healthcare process [ 5 ]. Process can either have a positive or negative impact on patient outcomes. Process mining provides the capability to study healthcare processes using data routinely stored in the electronic health records (EHRs). This can provide details about executed activities, their sequence, duration, and resources involved [ 9 ]. Using this information, stakeholders in healthcare environments can analyze and improve clinical processes. The order in which tasks can be performed and its resource allocation can be modified to improve clinical outcomes; clinical processes can be checked against recommended clinical guidelines to ensure adherence to best practices.

Process mining has been applied in several healthcare domains, using different techniques and diverse datasets, and on multiple clinical settings [ 9 ]. Process mining has shown good results in healthcare and its application can potentially be expanded to include additional uses.

2.2. Customer Journey Mapping

Improving the customer’s experience (CX) has become one of the priorities in numerous business contexts and industries [ 13 ]. According to a study by McColl-Kennedy et al. [ 2 ], there are multiple definitions of CX, but the authors highlight the importance of focusing on elements that create value (e.g., resources, activities, context, interactions, customer role), cognitive responses, and discrete emotions at different touchpoints throughout the customer’s interactions.

Customer Journey Mapping (CJM) has gained popularity among researchers and practitioners as a tool to obtain knowledge about customers and to understand better the customer experience. A CJM is a device that allows researchers to attain a deeper comprehension about experiences, the generation of specific metrics, and the understanding of how they interact throughout the different stages required to provide a product or service [ 14 ]. A CJM is a visual representation that shows the sequence of events that emerge during the interaction between a customer and a specific process. For example, in a customer service process, the customer interacts with several touchpoints and through different channels such as creating an on-line request, emailing support documents, receiving an email response, and completing a customer satisfaction survey using a mobile app (see Figure 1 ). Throughout the whole process, the customer engages with each activity (touchpoints), which can help the people involved in the process to understand all different stages in a journey that a customer may undertake.

Example of the sequence of frequent activities in a customer service process.

Primarily, CJMs allow organizations to track customer interactions and to inform decision-making processes on how they could be enriched [ 15 ].

2.3. Components of CJM (Customer Journey Mapping)

In a recent study [ 14 ], the authors conducted a literature review to clarify the most common components of CJM. The main components identified are: customer, journey, mapping, goal, touchpoint, timeline, channel, stage, experience, lens, and multimedia. Those components and their corresponding description are explained in Section 3 .

These components can be used to create a blueprint for a company’s products or services, giving companies a more comprehensive view about their work methods, processes, required information, technology used in their operations, and factors that could emerge in specific domains. These components can serve as an important technique to elicit the evaluation of the experience throughout the journey. They can help to identify less important touchpoints, to reveal what customer actually do, instead of what process’ owners think they do, to assess customer experience, and to promote strategic initiatives, among other uses [ 1 ].

CJM has been applied in multiple domains to improve existing products and services or to create new ones. Uses include mobile services [ 16 ], marketing [ 15 ], and libraries [ 17 ].

There are other process-oriented methods available not only to investigate customers’ interactions but also to assess their experiences based on customer interviews (CIT—Critical Incident Technique) [ 18 ], surveys considering the sequence of the customer touchpoints (SIT—Sequential Incident Technique) [ 19 ], or performing service walkthroughs (STA -Service Transaction Analysis-) [ 20 ]. Nevertheless, all of them involve the collection of new data. CJM using process mining can become a data-driven alternative to efficiently map customer journeys.

3. Process Mining in Healthcare as a Customer Journey Mapping Tool

According with Terragni and Hassani [ 21 ], only few studies have applied process mining in costumer journey analysis, making it an interdisciplinary field with great opportunity to conduct research in this background. Particularly, they proposed a novel approach for applying process mining techniques to web log customer journey analysis. Bernard and Andritsos [ 14 ] were the first authors to propose the application of process mining for a CJM, highlighting the potential of this discipline to analyze customer journeys. The authors proposed a customer journey exploration map using event logs and data analytics [ 22 ] as an opportunity to characterize hundreds or thousands of customer journeys at the same time. Bernard and Andritsos extended their work in [ 23 ], and developed a javascript-based tool that can handle process mining models to create a CJM at different levels of granularity; and additionally, they introduced the use of genetic algorithms to solve the problem of automatically building CJMs from event logs [ 24 ].

Process mining and patient journey has been studied before [ 25 , 26 ], but further studies are needed to fully understand the experience of the patient. Therefore, in this paper we address this research gap. In Section 2.3 , each of the main components of CJM (based on [ 14 ]) has been mentioned. In this section, those components are now mapped to each of their corresponding concepts in the healthcare domain and what they can mean for a process mining perspective as follow.

Customer : as we stated, the customer is the stakeholder who undertakes the journey. Considering the variety of existing healthcare processes and the people involved in their execution, three different customers categories can be identified [ 9 , 27 ]: patients, healthcare professionals, and healthcare administrators.

Journey: a customer journey should contain at least one journey. An event log [ 5 ] can be defined as a set of traces, each encompassing all the events performed in a particular process instance or a case. Journey Maps can be discovered from information stored in event logs. Moreover, a journey can be part of any healthcare process such as inpatient episodes [ 28 ]), outpatient visits, diagnostic test paths, telemedicine paths, and online patient portal paths [ 27 ].

Mapping: Process mining techniques are used in multiple industries, including healthcare, to create process maps [ 29 ]. There are dozens of discovering algorithms that focus on the control-flow perspective supported by distinct process mining tools; such as, ProM [ 30 ] (e.g., Heuristics Miner, and Fuzzy Miner), Disco [ 31 ] (interactive process map) and Celonis [ 32 ] (the flow of most frequent activities known as happy path).

Goal: allows, both organization and customer, to establish a common target to analyze with more detail the customer journey. It obtains the process ’As-Is’ representation, recognizes time constraints, identifies process bottlenecks, performs an organizational analysis (resource perspective), detects process deviations, reduces process complexity, among others, are typical examples of outcomes that can be obtained when applying process mining techniques [ 5 ] to analyze specific customer journey goals. From the healthcare point of view, the clinical outcome is the most relevant goal. These outcomes have a direct impact in changing the patient’s long-term quality of life.

Touchpoint: is a set of interactions (events) where a patient might be involved during the healthcare process (journey). Those interactions may include events such as: diagnose, treat, follow-up, and the application of preventative measures, thus with the intention of improving clinical outcomes [ 9 ].

Timeline: refers to an end-to-end timestamp [ 5 ] registered in order to track when the distinct touchpoints occur and it’s order.

Channel: depicts the method chosen by the customer to participate with the different touchpoints identified previously. Typical examples are: (i) Hospital Information Systems/Process Information Systems [ 33 ]/Electronic Patient Records (EPR) [ 34 ]/Electronic medical records (EMR); (ii) Patient Portal (Medical history, schedule appointments, message their physician, view bills and make payments all online) (iii) ePrescribing (sending prescriptions to pharmacies); among others.

Stage: touchpoints could be grouped into a cluster of activities (defined as stages or phases). Distinct techniques could be used to split the process into “sub-processes”, much like, using the own semantics of the process (decomposition manually), using Passages, applying Single-Entry Single-Exit (SESE) decomposition, or using generic decomposition approaches [ 35 ]. For instance, in a healthcare process, a cluster of “Registration” events or “Treatment Decision” events, as well as “Inpatient” and “outpatient” events could be identified and grouped.

Experience: aims to capture and evaluate stakeholder’s experience (e.g., healthcare professionals and patients) of different services. Positive or negative perceptions can be obtained through several mechanism such as: experts feedback [ 36 ], patients feedback using some of the multiple experience surveys available [ 37 ], quality of life and other patient centered measures (e.g., patient satisfaction, patient perceptions, patient engagement, patient participation, and patient preferences), staff observations, shadowing, video recording [ 38 ]. Using process mining techniques would allow process owners to monitor and analyze identified journeys, and to improve the user experience (e.g., identify Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and metrics to increase patient satisfaction).

Lens: is a domain’s specific component that can be added and would represent particular elements of the process landscape. Lens might differ across different process scenarios. Some common examples are: environmental factors taking into account during healthcare process execution (e.g., pollution, weather, exposure to ultraviolet radiation), food hygiene, pests and vectors (e.g., mosquitoes), unhealthy housing, and waste management.

Multimedia: similar to other industries, important data can be extracted from different multimedia content that registered how the distinct process touchpoints are executed. Video recording [ 38 ], audio, multicast, and broadcast, are examples of traditional media that can be represented, stored, and transformed into event logs.

4. Case Study

To understand the importance of the application of CJM using process mining, a case study with two distinct scenarios have been carried out for different diagnostics. The first case study is for patients with Pneumonia, and the second case study is for patients with Acute Myocardial Infarction.

4.1. Context and Description

Both cases were conducted using historical data collected in a 500-bed teaching hospital located in Santiago, Chile and the study was approved by the institutional ethics committee (Id: 180504002). The historical data was extracted from the Hospital Information System and the Emergency Department’s Electronic Medical Record. Multiple activities can be executed on both settings (in the clinic or the Emergency Room), therefore the prefix “ER” will be used to differentiate them. Furthermore, it is relevant to mention that the project was reviewed and authorized by the hospital’s local human subject review board.

4.2. Data and Event Log Construction

The data was extracted in CSV format, and encompassed information about clinical episodes that took place between 2 January 2017 and 30 June 2018. The data includes 6715 cases, including 523,521 events executed, and eight main process activities. We found detailed information about patient demographics, clinical episodes, diagnoses, and timestamped process activities.

To create the event log, we considered the following features:

• Episode ID: corresponds to the episode identifier.
• Activity: refers to the phases that involved patient’s interactions with the clinical services.
• Episode diagnosis: patient diagnosis documented by the physician.
• Activity details: further details about the episode diagnosis registered by the physician.
• Timestamp:date of the activity performed.
• Age: patient’s age at the moment of the episode.
• Gender: patient’s gender.

To load the information into the selected process mining tool (see further details in Section 4.3 ), we executed a set of previous steps (see Figure 2 ) to perform a data configuration procedure to generate a proper data model which in turn allows to perform a detailed process analysis.

Steps followed for data processing and process analysis.

After the data was extracted we split it into two CSV files. The first file is identified as the event log that contained the case identifier plus some attributes (“Cases_EventLog”). In this event log the following fields were included: EpisodeID, gender, age, and episode diagnosis. Table 1 shows an extract of the “Cases_EventLog”.

Example of an event log at case identifier level.

The second event log ("Activities_EventLog") contains information about the process activities. We included following fields: EpisodeID, activity, timestamp and activity details. Table 2 shows an extract of the “Activities_EventLog”.

Example of the an event log at activity level.

Third, we uploaded both files into a data pool and, fourth, we created a new data model. This step involved adding the two files mentioned above, establishing the activity table and selecting the following columns: CaseId column (EpisodeID), activity column, and timestamp column. To finish the data model creation step, a entity-relation diagram was created. The EpisodeId was selected as a Foreign key between the source table (“Cases_EventLog”) and the target table (“Activities_EventLog”). Once the data model was created, the data was loaded into the analysis tool. Finally, in our sixth step, we execute the process analysis for both case studies presented in Section 4.4 and Section 4.5 .

4.3. Process Mining Tool

There are several tools that offer distinct techniques and algorithms to perform process mining analysis. For the case studies of this article, the Celonis platform [ 32 ] was selected. Celonis is a leader in Enterprise Performance Acceleration process mining software. This commercial platform has recently been renewed into an Intelligent Business Cloud and now provides a set of features grouped by distinct categories like Business Process Analytics, Action Engine, Event Log Collection, Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence, and Process Automation, among others. We have chosen this tool mainly due to its capacity to handle complex processes together with the feature of being able to generate the most common path that cases follow—also known as “happy-path”—which not only helps us to identify touchpoints between the patient and the process, but it also visualizes and explores all the variants that have been discovered in the process. In addition, we have decided to take advantage of the process analytics features and capabilities that Celonis offers, in order to generate a set of analytic visualizations which helped us to explore the process in a more interactive way and to create valuable process KPIs regarding the selected episodes as explained below.

4.4. Case Study I: Pneumonia

In this first case study, process mining was used to find the patients’ journey map when they are diagnosed with Pneumonia.

Process Models and Journey Analysis

A process discovery algorithm was used to obtain the model that shows the different touchpoints and the patients’ journey that is presented in Figure 3 . In total there are 12 touchpoints where most of the cases (97 percent) start in the Emergency Room (ER) where laboratory exams, medical images and procedures are performed. Given the nature of the dataset, all patients required hospitalization and presented a median length of stay of 7 days (see Figure 4 ).

Pneumonia patients’ journey map.

Length of stay of patients who were 65 years of age or older.

A variant analysis was used to discover the different paths that patients go through on the healthcare process and their relationship with the length of stay. In the case of pneumonia the most common variant covers 28 percent of the total cases and has six touchpoints as shown in Figure 5 : ER (laboratory, images, medication, procedure) hospitalization and discharge with a medium length of hospitalization stay of 4 days.

Variant analysis for pneumonia patients.

With this analysis we found a relationship between the age, gender, length of stay and complexity of the process model, measured by number of variants. Patients between 65 and 76 years old, most of them men (64 percent) have an average of 12 days of hospital stay with 41 process variants (see Figure 6 ) in comparison, patients between 76 and 87 years old with a majority of woman (59 percent) had an average length of stay of 13 days with 66 process variants (see Figure 7 ), while patients between 87 and 100 years old with a majority of men (54 percent), had the highest average length of stay with 18 days among the three groups analyzed, and 36 process variants (see Figure 8 ). This highlights that older patients require additional touchpoints like medical images, laboratory exams and procedures, which can be translated into different patient journeys. Additionally, we found that the prevalence rate is first higher in the men’s age group of 65–76 with a 64%; then it switches over to the women’s age group of 76–87 with a 59%, and then higher again among the men’s group, this time those between 87 and 100 years old (see Table 3 ).

Length of stay of patients between 65 and 76 years of age.

Length of stay of patients between 76 and 87 years of age.

Length of stay of patients between 87 and 100 years of age.

A comparative summary of different pneumonia groups analyzed.

4.5. Case Study II: Acute Myocardial Infarction (AMI)

In this second case study, process mining was used to find the patients’ journey map when they are diagnosed with an AMI.

In this case the patient’s journey also starts in most of the cases (65 percent) with ER. In comparison with the pneumonia’s journey where most of the exams and medical images are performed in the Emergency Room, in the case of hearth stroke the exams and procedures are performed before or after the procedures that follows hospitalization as Figure 9 shows.

AMI patients’ journey map.

A relationship was found between the hospital length of stay and the number of variants and touchpoints. In cases with length of stay between 1 and 7 days, the number of variants is 50 and the most common path has five touchpoints as seen in Figure 10 .

Variant and short stay for AMI patients.

Cases with lengths of stay longer than 7 days tend to have more variants, in this case 54 and the path that covers 25 percent of observed cases has nine touchpoints it the patients journey ( Figure 11 ).

Variant and extended stay for AMI patients.

4.6. Lead to Key Indicators

A patient’s experience during healthcare is a key aspect of healthcare quality. Developing a visual display that presents how the process is executed and characterizing it according to distinct attributes would help to monitor the process more effectively and enable the implementation of improvement measures. Healthcare organizations should constantly seek to assess the patients’ perception of the services they receive. This dimension was not included in the customer journeys assessed since patient satisfaction was not available in the studied dataset. However, the inclusion of standard patient satisfaction surveys in CJM activities is strongly encouraged. As an example, the HCAHPS (Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers & Systems) survey assesses several dimensions of the patient’s experience [ 39 ]:

• Communication with healthcare professionals;
• Responsiveness of hospital staff;
• Operation of hospital units;
• Cleanliness of hospital facilities;
• Quiet environment;
• Discharge information;
• Amenities provided.

The assessment of those indicators (among others) would help clinicians and administrators to identify where the changes are required, to proactively test them and to assess the impact of those changes, and to determine the most effective ways to improve patient care, operational efficiency, and enhance process outcomes.

5. Discussion

CJM has become an interesting and relevant management technique with a clear set of concepts to understand and describe process paths from the customer point of view. One of the most relevant aspects is the capacity to provide a context for the different variables that affect the customer experience.

The use of process mining to generate customer journey maps has created a powerful analysis tool to understand how processes variants (paths) and touchpoints may affect the customer experience, as well to discover how end-to-end processes look like.

Specifically, in healthcare processes the concepts of CJM can be directly applied, contextualizing them in a much better and detailed way, so as to provide complementary information for the analysis of these processes. Adding complementary information will also allow users to include patients’ feedback to improve and enrich clinical processes. In the same way, it also allow healthcare experts to describe processes, not only using a conceptual process model, but also using real process paths and variants (what customers really do), including more frequent and less frequent touchpoints, analyzing process performance, and identifying process deviations. Based on a more detailed description, it becomes easier to discover process improvement opportunities.

When combining the application of CJM technique and process mining discipline on a real-life case study of a clinical process in a hospital in Santiago, Chile, it has become clear that routinely collected clinical data has the capability to reveal—with great detail— the multiple interactions (touchpoints) that a patient has when visiting the hospital. The CJ maps can be quickly generated from electronic healthcare record data and become a valuable visual tool that allows a detailed analysis on how patients interact during the attention process (end-to-end process), according to specific diagnoses, which may provide important details about the analyzed healthcare processes.

In addition to discovering the process using real-world-data, these methods can help to establish gaps between the expected and the real patient experience. Comparing the two case studies, it was found that the trajectories vary depending on the diagnosis, which serves as a useful input to understand relevant touchpoints and where the process could be improved.

The approach proposed in this article is novel as it is aimed at understanding the interaction between the patient and the emergency department at each touchpoint, using a systematic approach based on CJM. In [ 25 ], the control-flow perspective is analyzed, i.e., in which order patient care is performed in an emergency room. In [ 28 ], it is analyzed how different healthcare professionals interact to care for patients. In this article, these views are complemented, also taking into account the patient’s perspective. In [ 26 ], the customer journey is analyzed in a simplified and ad-hoc way; instead, the approach proposed in this article uses a systematic approach based on CJM techniques.

A key aspect in analyzing healthcare processes and generating key indicators is how the discovered model can be complemented with additional information. In both of our case studies, we were able to add demographic patient data such as age and gender. Adding more information to the study will broaden the possibilities of generating tailored and valuable indicators for each patient type.

One of the challenges that arises when using process mining to understand the CJM is to find the most effective method to measure the patient’s experience in order to link it with specific process paths. Typically, organizations obtain customer feedback by means of surveys, based on samples that lacks of the necessary respond rate to be reliable.

6. Limitations

In our study, we identified some limitations. First, the dataset did not include the outpatient component of the patient’s journey. Having access to the whole care continuum should provide a richer picture of the complete patient journey. Second, patient satisfaction surveys were not available in the included dataset, which limited our ability to assess the association between specific process variants and patient satisfaction. This dimension will be addressed in future work. Finally, in the presented case studies, the Lens and Multimedia components have not been evaluated since the event logs were generated from electronic medical records which only capture the clinical dimensions of the process.

7. Conclusions and Future Work

This article describes how to apply process mining techniques to understand patient journeys in healthcare, providing a new and complementary perspective for understanding and improving patient care. The proposed approach allows to analyze touchpoints in the lights of the patient and to understand the multiple variants or paths that appear in the customer journeys and how they could be related to the patient’s experience. It can be used to deal with complex processes, including those with multiple trajectories. We have been able to conduct a case study where we have applied the CJM technique to a real-life healthcare process, encouraging the creation of healthcare KPIs as an alternative to assess how healthcare units are achieving their goals in order to provide improvements on quality of care.

As future work, we would like to explore the application of additional process mining algorithms and techniques in order to gain knowledge from the control-flow perspective, but also from other process perspectives, such as the organizational perspective, to analyze the experience of a patient at each touchpoint and the interactions with clinical staff. Further, expanded case studies should be carried out, including the complete care continuum, to see the proper use of this vision and adjust the concepts if necessary. The incorporation of patient satisfaction represents a key challenge to work on.

Acknowledgments

We thank Jerome Geyer-Klingeberg and Celonis Academic Alliance for their support and material.

Abbreviations

The following abbreviations are used in this manuscript:

Author Contributions

All authors undertook research, writing and review tasks throughout this study. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.

This research was partially funded by the 16CTTS-66390 grant by the Chilean National Development Agency (CORFO).

Conflicts of Interest

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

How to Create Patient Journey Mapping for Superior Healthcare Experiences

The healthcare system faces constant challenges due to different priorities, budget restrictions, and limited supplies. Along with this, they also need to ensure a positive patient experience by increasing healthcare quality. 

Healthcare is a complex system; hence, the fundamental step is to provide information to the patients that they can easily understand and actively participate in the treatment process. 

For healthcare organizations, patient experience and engagement are often a differentiating factor between hospitals. Understanding patient experience through every stage of their care helps hospitals improve overall patient experience and internal communication. This is where  patient journey mapping  comes in. Patient journey mapping is essential in identifying the shortfalls in your patient experience and understanding your patients’ needs better.

What is Patient Journey Mapping?

Patient journey mapping works to identify and understand the details of all patient touch points within a specific healthcare experience. 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.

The healthcare customer journey map represents a patient’s journey while receiving healthcare. The healthcare journey mapping helps the healthcare professionals to see from the patient’s point of view and modify the healthcare approach.

Patients’ healthcare journey mapping helps to visualize highs, lows, and blind spots in end to end patient engagement cycle . Understanding the patients’ clinical and emotional journey can help you build a holistic view of what your patient is going through during this period. 

Healthcare journey mapping will help to find answers to the questions, for example:  

• What is the patient experiencing?  
• How is the patient living with their newly diagnosed condition?  
• What about the patient’s family and relatives?  
• Which part of the healthcare organization needs improvement?  
• How happy is the patient with the healthcare facility?  

When done correctly, the healthcare customer journey map will make it easier for your facility to identify obstacles, discover places of improvement, and restructure intervention approaches across the entire healthcare system. 

Benefits of Patient Journey Map Framework

Patient journey mapping for a hospital is an opportunity to turn your patients’ experience with the system from  reactive to proactive . Engaging patients during every stage of their healthcare will help build their confidence and trust and encourage them to refer your facility to their friends and families. 

Healthcare customer journey map offers advantages like: 

• Exposes gaps   

Patient experience map aids to expose blind spots in your system, like appointment process, hospital care, customer service etc., which can help unfold the truth that might be creating a negative experience.  

When a patient is unhappy, there is a  91%  chance that they won’t revisit your hospital and might typically inform nine to 15 people about your services. Therefore, the patient journey mapping plan helps find solutions per their needs and preferences.  

• Improves communication   

Communication is an essential tool for doctors to understand patients’ health. However, exchanging patient information and coordinating care can be a challenge and build frustration in your patients. This misalignment can be due to factors like confidentiality or incompatible systems.  

The patient journey mapping template effectively sets up transparent  communication between the patients and healthcare professionals.  Through a patient experience map, you can easily identify the red flags in the communication system.  

• Understands patients’ concerns   

Most patients are unaware of the relationship between their medical condition and symptoms. A patient journey mapping template can overcome these struggles faced by your patients. In addition, the healthcare journey mapping template helps to understand their issues and educate them about their diagnosis.  

• Supports patients during the post-treatment stage   

After a healthcare professional diagnoses the patient, they suggest treatment. After receiving the treatment, patients have to live with the new lifestyle, including medications, physical therapy, counseling, etc.  

Healthcare journey mapping helps support patients during this post-treatment stage by monitoring their post-treatment life, identifying problems, and helping discover ways to solve these problems. 

• Streamline healthcare workflow   

Healthcare customer journey map will help you upgrade the  usability and functionality  of online patient portals, websites, and mobile apps to put more control in the patients’ hands, increase patient flow, and cut operational expenses.  

Stages of Healthcare Journey Mapping

The different stages of the patient journey mapping help set an example of the intricate level of patients’ involvement in your facility. The healthcare customer journey map plan usually occurs at (but are not limited to) the following stages:    

• Pre-visit    

A patient’s journey starts when they begin to experience symptoms and try to research, or contact a facility via phone call, text, email, or an in-person visit.  

Nearly  81% of patients  prefer scheduling their appointments online. Hence, the software used should be designed in such a way that it is easy for your patient to schedule an appointment and have streamlined communication with the healthcare professionals. 

• During visit    

After establishing contact with the hospital, the patient sets an in-person or virtual appointment with a healthcare professional for the preliminary examination.   

The patient will have the following experience in your facility:  

• Checking in at the front desk  
• Waiting in the lobby to be called  
• Discussion with staff before speaking to a professional  
• Care from healthcare professionals and staff  

The diagnosis might not be a one-step process as the patient may require several tests that the healthcare professional can review and conclude. 

• Post-visit   

During this stage, the patient goes through the following experiences:  

• Post-care instructions  
• Hospital discharge process  
• Completing a feedback survey  
• Paying for the treatment  
• Post-surgery calls from the nurse or doctor  

The patient might have to stay in your facility for the treatment process or receive home care. Healthcare professionals may overlook this stage, especially when the patient is receiving home care or is responding well to the treatment.   

How to Create Patient Journey Map for Superior Healthcare Experiences

To create and implement a practical patient experience map, you must understand the patient’s service. Without entirely understanding their patients, you may find it challenging to fill the gaps in your system. 

Define the goals and the scope of the patient journey mapping plan

The first step for any organization should be defining their goals and scope and beginning with the healthcare journey mapping for a hospital. To understand the goals and scope, you can create a list of questions like:    

• What are the key points this organization needs to tackle?   
• What are the expected results or end goals the organization wishes to achieve by using a healthcare customer journey map?   

By defining the goals and scope and answering these questions, you can ensure everyone is on the same page. This step is the key to success as the organizations can measure the progress being made to reach their end goals.   

To begin their mapping journey, you should also understand the concept of a healthcare journey mapping plan by conducting tremendous research and hiring an expert to guide your organization through the mapping process.   

Map the patient touchpoints

Patient touchpoints include  where and how your patient interacts with your facility  and their experiences. This process will consist of all the stages of the patient journey mapping, for example, pre-visit, visit, treatment, and post-visit stages.   

Touchpoints will make up most of the patient journey mapping of a hospital.  Therefore, as you conduct patient experience map research and note their touchpoints, it is essential that you also include the potential challenges and the patient’s emotional state.   

Once you define different patient touchpoints, you can arrange them on the patient experience map.   

Make use of technology and tools to automate parts of the healthcare customer journey map

It is essential that you actively involve and support your patients in decision-making. This might seem a straightforward task; however, with a complex healthcare system, it becomes necessary to automate certain parts of the patient journey.   

Automation can be achieved using tools and technology, which can act as a front door to your organization to achieve desired outcomes, such as patient compliance and satisfaction, and efficiency.   

You can use digital engagement tools in various parts of a patient journey like:   

• Appointment booking   
• Appointment reminders   
• Medicine reminders   
• Follow-up scheduling   
• Collecting patient feedback   

With digital patient engagement tools, you can expand your reach, reduce manual workload, and keep the patients better informed.  

Create a patient communication plan across each stage of patient journey mapping

An effective patient communication plan helps eliminate the barriers between your organization and patients and ensure that every person involved in the care process is well-informed about the patient.   

The patient communication plan must include hardware and software to improve the performance of the organizations. To create an effective patient communication plan, you must:   

• Analyze the current communication system   
• Encourage internal discussions   
• Adopt more recent communication technologies   
• Train the healthcare staff about the more recent technologies   
• Monitor the effectiveness of the more recent communication technologies.

Collect patient feedback for continuous improvement in the healthcare journey map

The most insightful data any healthcare organization can collect is getting feedback from their patients, who have interacted with the organization. You can look out for information like:   

• What was the initial experience of the patient?  
• How easy or difficult was it for the patient to use the organization’s app/website?  
• What problems initially encountered by the patients are not solved?  

By collecting patient feedback, you can make data-driven decisions for your patients and the organization and make continuous improvements. 

Moving forward with a healthcare journey map

Despite years of expertise, it’s easy for the healthcare system to face persistent issues in the patient care process. It’s about uncovering in-depth insights via journey maps and translating them into actionable strategies to bridge the gap between emerging patient needs and the present state of the organization.  

Once on the right track, the organizations can manage and grow relationships at every step of patient care. The more patient-centric an organization becomes, the better their experience builds,  leading to a higher quality of patient care, retention, loyalty, and improved well-being.  

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How to Use Customer Journey Mapping to Improve Your Healthcare Company’s UX

Do you know what your customers think about your healthcare company’s digital experiences? Before you respond, ask yourself this: How do your customers feel at each interaction point along their journey? Which specific touchpoints tend to cause frustration or confusion?

If you can’t answer those questions with confidence, then you almost certainly have undiscovered pain points. These pain points are putting a drag on your customers’ overall impression of your brand. And that means it’s time to invest in customer journey mapping.

What is Customer Journey Mapping, and Why is it Important?

Customer journey mapping is an exercise that enables your team to develop empathy for your customers by viewing your customer journey through their eyes. By reconstructing each step of a customer’s interactions — and learning how they actually experience each of those interactions — you can uncover UX issues and discover opportunities for improvement.

Most healthcare companies are aware of at least a handful of touchpoints that could stand to be improved upon. Too often, however, they focus on fixing specific, high-profile touchpoints without first taking the time to understand how they relate to every other part of the customer journey. As a result, they may fail to address the root causes of a problem — or solve the wrong one, entirely.

In contrast, customer journey mapping gives you a holistic, bird’s-eye view of what is and isn’t working across all touchpoints (and the departments that own them). Organizations are therefore able to work collaboratively to prioritize strategically and align around a cohesive plan of action.

Customer journey mapping can be useful at any stage of a product’s lifecycle. If you’re at the outset of a new project, use customer journey mapping to ensure you build it the right way the first time. And if you already have a functioning member portal or app, you can use a healthcare customer journey map to further hone your UX and improve customer satisfaction.

The Benefits of Customer Journey Mapping

There are many benefits to customer journey mapping. These include:

• Increased alignment across functional groups
• A documented, end-to-end map of all of the touchpoints that comprise your customer journey
• An understanding of your customers’ emotions related to each touchpoint, as well as major gaps and friction points
• Actionable insights into the friction points your customer faces along their journey
• The ability to appropriately prioritize opportunities in a way that supports your organization’s established KPIs

A Step-by-Step Guide to Customer Journey Mapping

Take the following steps to create a customer journey map, uncover critical user experience pain points, and strategically identify top priorities.

1. Put together a cross-functional customer journey mapping team

It’s critical that you put together a cross-functional team to build out your customer journey maps. No one person (or team) can construct the map on their own. For example, your marketing, sales, and customer service teams may each be responsible for various touchpoints along the journey.  By including representatives from each of your key functional groups, you get a complete and comprehensive customer journey map that everyone can rally around.

2. Select the right approach

There is more than one way to tackle customer journey mapping. Consider the following, common approaches and select the ones that best match your circumstances and objectives.

• Current state vs. future state customer journey mapping. If you want to get a handle on the friction points in your existing customer journey, then you are using current-state customer journey mapping. If, on the other hand, you are at the outset of a new project, you can use future-state customer journey mapping to envision new customer journeys (or new touchpoints within an existing journey). In this case, customer journey mapping can help you refine the UX of a product or digital experience before you build it.
• Hypothesis-first vs. research-first customer journey mapping. A research-first approach takes longer to achieve and often results in deep customer insights being gathered before you start mapping. The process allows you to holistically assess every touchpoint in your customer’s journey without preconceived notions. The hypothesis-first approach, on the other hand, is substantially quicker because you typically come to the table with a known problem. Beyond that, you have an educated guess as to what’s causing the problem. In this context, you can use customer journey mapping to validate (or disprove) your hypothesis.

3. Map your touchpoints

Next, work together as a team to identify all of the touchpoints that occur along your customer’s journey. Construct a map that places each of the touchpoints in order so that you can see the entire customer journey from start to finish. Make sure that each cross-functional team contributes to this effort so that your customer journey map is as comprehensive as possible.

4. Conduct research

All customer journey mapping exercises require research, which is used to assess the UX of each individual touchpoint and uncover pain points. Depending on your objectives and available tools, you may choose to employ qualitative research, quantitative research, or some combination of the two.

Quantitative research is all about uncovering user behaviors and trends using data, such as click-tracking, time on page, or user dropout rates. It’s most helpful when it comes to identifying new problems or verifying the existence of assumed problems. For example, quantitative research can tell you that 20% of your users abandon their session on a particular screen while attempting to create an account on a member portal. In that sense, quantitative can tell you with certainty that you have a problem — but it can’t tell you why users abandon their session when they do.

To understand why, you’ll need qualitative research. Qualitative user research is based on a mixture of observation and interviews. It enables you to dig into customer sentiment — how users feel as they attempt to complete a task and move through the customer journey. For example, you might observe a small group of users attempting to create that member portal account and then interview them to learn more about what they found frustrating or confusing. This information is critical in your team’s ability to identify the best possible UX solutions for the problems at hand. In most cases, you’ll want to use a combination of quantitative and qualitative research to thoroughly vet your customer journey map and identify friction points and opportunities for improvement.

5. Prioritize next steps

Once you’ve identified all the friction points, gaps, and opportunities within your customer journey map, it’s time to prioritize next steps. To do that, map each of your takeaways to your organization’s established KPIs to identify the highest priority to-do items. In addition, plan to perform an impact-versus-effort exercise to determine which to-do items will have the best ROI. Plan to tackle high-priority, high-ROI items first, then work your way down to the lower priority issues as time and budgets allow.

By embracing customer journey mapping, you stand to gain deeper empathy for your customers — and craft a digital experience that enhances your brand by removing friction for your users.

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• [Download Free Template] How to create a patient journey map

Patient journey mapping is a process that helps you—as healthcare providers—to visualize the complete experience of your patients who seek and use your care services.  

This includes every single touchpoint (whether online or offline) that a patient encounters in the process of finding a care provider, scheduling an appointment, to having the consultation, and even post-care interactions. 

A good understanding of a patient journey map, and all the pitfalls that the patient can encounter while seeking care, can help you pre-emptively improve your operations to deliver a delightful and consistent patient experience . 

In this article, we’ll dive deeper into various aspects of patient journey mapping, stages of a patient journey, how to create a patient journey map and the benefits you can realize by using the right tools. 

If you’d rather jump to the steps to create a patient journey map, you can do that as well. Go to:

What is patient journey mapping? 

Patient journey mapping is the process of visualizing the connection between various interactions and touchpoints patients have during their relationship with a healthcare practice.  

Mapping healthcare journeys helps providers understand:  

• What is the patient going through? 
• What are the patient’s primary concerns? 
• Is the patient able to cope with their diagnosis? 
• Is information regarding the patient’s diagnosis easily accessible? 
• Is the patient able to reach you to book a consultation easily? 
• Is the patient satisfied with the care they’re receiving?   

With this knowledge, providers can spot inconsistencies, find operational bottlenecks, and devise strategies to improve them.

Healthcare providers need to be obsessed with patient journey. The journey begins way before a patient visits the healthcare facility to interact with the provider, and it ends a lot after their treatment. A good patient journey map integrates various virtual and physical touchpoints. Uzodinma Umeh, Chief Medical Officer, Zuri Health

Before we get into the steps to create a journey map, let’s look at the stages a patient goes through before any consultation. 

5 crucial stages of a patient journey 

The 5 stages common in most of the patient journeys are: 

1. Awareness  

The patient recognizes a need for care at this point and starts looking for providers.  

The patient evaluates their symptoms, does research, thinks about potential medical issues that might need treatment, and may even interact with message boards. 

It begins the moment when the patient experiences a symptom. Most of the time, they go online to find a treatment or a solution to their pain. Healthcare providers need to use this opportunity to position themselves virtually by offering a solution, allowing them to research treatments, and book appointments with ease. Uzodinma Umeh, Chief Medical Officer, Zuri Health

Online searches, review websites, advertising initiatives, networking, and friends/family referrals are a few examples of how patients find out about healthcare services.   

However, patients may face certain challenges at this stage. Such as: 

• Lack of information about their condition
• Inability to find a provider nearby who they think could help
• Feelings of fear and anxiety regarding their concerns

The key to reaching patients at this stage lies in your online presence. You can help your patients by: 

• Publishing posts about the treatments you provide
• Publishing educational blogs posts on your website about the conditions and how to manage them 
• Getting yourself listed on GoogleMyBusiness 

It goes without saying, you should monitor the results of your efforts by using website analytics tools and collect patient feedback through surveys . 

Baptist Health South Florida has nailed this stage by introducing an online triage tool on their website. It asks patients a series of questions around their symptoms and accordingly directs them to e-visit, ER, urgent care, or physician’s office.  

2. Consideration  

The patient analyzes their options to see if your healthcare facility can satisfy their needs. Referrals, coverage and perks, suggestions, accessibility, and ratings and reviews are all things that patients take into account during this stage.   

When it comes to healthcare reviews and recommendations, 83% of patients trust their friends and family, while 62% trust reviews online from people they haven’t even met. This is exactly why healthcare businesses need to collect feedback and reviews physically and virtually to bring in patients from referrals. Chantelle Fraser, Vice President – Africa Sales, LeadSquared

Patients frequently interact with your website and social media accounts and call or email you. Additionally, if you are hard to get in touch with, they will go on to the next applicant. 

At this point, you can find out more about your potential patient, specifically about their preferred method of communication, and make sure you provide it. For instance, if a patient prefers communicating via email, you should reach them on this platform.  

Tools you can use to better connect with patients at this stage are:  

• Email marketing solutions that help automate emails that reach the right person at the right time,  
• Tools that help you segment visitors and create targeted ad campaigns,
• Chatbots help you reach patients with concerns in real time and get a deeper understanding of their concerns.   

3. Acquisition 

Direct patient contact with your organization is the first indicator of the acquisition stage.  

As part of the booking and new patient acquisition process, you will interact with patients via phone calls, the user portal, texts, and emails.   

The patient generally arranges a meeting and visits a doctor or takes a telehealth consultation for a preliminary checkup.  

Common challenges patients face at this stage are: 

• Lack of access to appointment booking portals and websites 
• Inability to reach providers at odd hours (e.g., 2 AM in the morning) 
• No-shows because of no reminder communications 
• Lengthy wait times at hospitals
• Extensive paperwork before consultation 

At this point, providers can use software to improve communications with patients. Such as: 

• Appointment scheduling solutions that help providers and patients find convenient timings for consultations.  
• Email automation tools that send notifications to patients before appointments to reduce the chance of no-shows.  
• Patient intake tools help them fill out forms and answer pertinent questions before they visit the facility.   

4. Service  

The stage of service delivery has to do with the medical care you administer to your patients. The medical consultation itself, check-in and check-out, registration and discharge, and payment are all components of this step.   

The type of service you provide will determine the patient’s satisfaction from your practice. 

Common challenges providers face at this stage are: 

• Difficulty locating comprehensive patient information across different touchpoints at the facility.   
• Administering the necessary treatment and meeting patient expectations.  
• In cases where the patient opts for home care, the inability to monitor and track their progress poses a significant challenge to the treatment process.  

The bulk of patient issues is rarely solved in the medical office. The patient’s experience persists into the treatment phase after assessment and any related procedures. They might receive an in-patient or out-patient plan or receive medicine and get discharged.   

At this point, you want to go beyond just calling to see how the patient is doing with their medicine and use the knowledge you have collected about them to deliver personalized care.  

Tools that can help providers at this stage are: 

• Billing and payment software that enables the speedy processing of invoices and collection of money through the patient or insurer.  
• A tool that unifies patient data and offers visual reports on a healthcare dashboard that is easy to use and accurate in its data collection and analysis.  
• A communication tool that allows patients to contact their healthcare provider whenever necessary and update their status as it changes.  
• Feedback collection tools like patient satisfaction surveys and questionnaires to gather information and testimonials for future use.   

5. Loyalty (on-going care) 

The best way to retain and nurture patients over time is to carry out post-visit follow-ups and keep track of their recovery.  

The patient journey also includes post-operation and post-visit care for your patients. You can use technology to take care of your patients by sending visit reminders, notify them of when their next vaccination is due, schedule house calls and much more. Collecting feedback and implementing it on a macro-level is another important post-visit step. Uzodinma Umeh, Chief Medical Officer, Zuri Health

Most healthcare providers often overlook this phase of the patient’s journey. Regardless of whether a patient’s treatment goes well or not, it is still necessary for the provider to follow up with them thereafter.   

Challenges hospitals face at this stage are:   

• Difficulty keeping in touch with patients as they recover or face issues during the aftercare process 
• Measuring patient satisfaction and their response to the treatment  
• Offering the necessary information to speed up recovery and keep patients aware of different reactions they may have when receiving care 

Providers must keep an eye on the patient’s aftercare and monitor their interactions with them. This phase is crucial because it guarantees the patient’s long-term welfare and lowers the likelihood of readmission.  

Tools that can help at this stage are:  

• Tools that track and monitor the patient’s progress, like a healthcare smartwatch or diagnosis tools 
• CRMs that help send notifications to patients to update them on recurring appointments and consultations 

Note that these stages may differ from one patient to another. This is why it is vital to create patient journey maps to understand gaps in your service and meet patient needs.

How to create a patient journey map

Journey maps are mainly of the following four types: 

• Current state : Useful for illustrating what your patients do, think, and feel as they interact with your practice with your present system. 
• Future state : Useful for illustrating your patient experiences with your practice in the future (usually goes well with your plans to implement a new system/technology). 
• Day in the life : This journey map illustrates what your patients do, think, and feel with or without your product or service. 
• Service blueprint : It is generally a roadmap with action items and support processes. 

Creating all four types of journey maps may not be required for your practice, especially when your goal is to understand your current standing. In the following section, we’ll learn how to create a patient journey map using the current state journey map. 

Create a patient journey map in 7 simple steps

FullStory has come up with a simple and easy-to-remember technique for creating journey maps. It includes 7 D’s, which are as follows: 

• Define: business goals 
• Describe: personas or customer attributes 
• Determine: touchpoints 
• Design: the journey (lay out the steps a customer takes while buying a product/service from your brand) 
• Designate: tag milestones, motivations, frustrations 
• Decide: Flag events that need action 
• Deploy: people, process, and technology to act upon 6 

We’ll apply this technique with some modifications to create journey maps for the healthcare sector. 

Step 1: Define your goals  

Why do you want to create a journey map?  

You might be facing certain challenges for which mapping a patient journey seems like a good starting point. For example,  

• To reduce no-shows 
• To increase retention 
• To increase patients from referral sources 
• To increase intake, and so on. 

Answering the “ why ” part will give you clarity on the purpose of creating a patient journey map and help you sketch the journey in a definitive direction. 

Step 2: Define your patient attributes  

You must be getting leads from your outreach, marketing, or referral programs. You’ll need to know whether you’re attracting the right patients to whom you can serve.  

Mapping patient attributes with the services you provide will help you tune your marketing, outreach, and referral programs. Lay out every single bit of information you have about your patients. Such as: 

• Demographic info : location, age, gender, ethnicity, education, employment, etc. 
• Engagement : appointment history, communication channels, feedback/satisfaction score, etc. 
• Health goals : challenges, conditions, treatment history, barriers to getting care, etc. 

Create an ideal patient profile based on the information you have about your patients. You can also use your CRM data to gain insights into how they came to know about you, their interactions with your facility, and more. 

Explore LeadSquared’s Healthcare CRM

Purpose-built to increase patient intake, engagement, and retention.

Note: Create separate journey maps for each patient profile you create. It will help you analyze patient experiences more deeply.   

Step 3: Determine touchpoints  

Touchpoints are the ways in which patients interact with your practice. They can be online like scheduling apps, websites, ads, etc., or offline interactions like phone calls, OPD walk-ins, etc. 

Some of the common touchpoints in the healthcare patient journey are: 

• Appointment scheduling : WhatsApp, text messaging, phone calls, patient portals, mhealth platforms, provider’s healthcare apps, etc. 
• Pre-check-in : appointment confirmations and reminders on email, WhatsApp, app notifications, text messages, phone calls 
• Check-in and during care : intake process (digital or physical), video consultation, telehealth, insurance verification, etc. 
• Post-visit : diagnosis notes, follow-up consultation scheduling, reminders, feedback via email, WhatsApp, app notifications, and text messages.  

Depending on the nature of your practice the touchpoints will vary. The idea is to note down all the possible sources of interactions with your patients. 

Step 4: Design a visual journey  

Once you’ve identified the touchpoints, it’s time to create a visual journey that your team can easily understand. 

You can plot: 

• Journey stages 
• Customer interactions and actions 
• Your patient’s needs and pains 
• Touchpoints 
• Their sentiments during those interactions 

Concurrently, mark the areas of improvement and who can own them.  

Also, keep your ideal patient profile and goal cards side by side to ensure you’re moving in the right direction. 

You can bookmark this page or download an editable PDF patient journey mapping template: 

Step 5: Designate milestones, motivations, frustrations  

This step of a patient journey highlights various kinds of friction a patient may encounter while contacting you for your product/service. 

For example, patients may not book an appointment because of one of the following reasons: 

• UI issues – If the interface through which they’re trying to schedule a consultation is not working at that time, patients may not be able to book an appointment. 
• Cognitive load – If the UI (User Interface) is not intuitive enough or too complex to understand, or the patients find it difficult to navigate to the services they see, they may drop off.  
• Emotional friction – What patients are feeling at that moment will determine their action on opting for your services. 

This exercise helps the admin understand what to fix and how to fix it. 

Step 6: Decide on the actions you need to take  

Until step 5, the journey was looked upon through the patient’s lens. Now that there’s better clarity on patient experiences and hesitations, it’s time to look at the back-office tasks that can be improved. 

It involves identifying the areas of improvement and how that can be done.  

Step 7: Deploy people, process, and technology to achieve your goals  

In this final step of creating a patient journey map, you assign roles, delegate tasks, and procure tools to act on the areas of improvement identified. 

Best practices to follow while creating a patient journey map 

When you’re just starting off, learn the journey mapping fundamentals and research existing journey maps for healthcare. 

Here are some helpful resources: 

• Neilsen Norman Group’s Journey Mapping 101  
• Atlassian’s team playbook on Customer Journey Mapping  
• Understanding Patient Journey webinar by LeadSquared 

Once you’ve understood the basics, follow these best practices to create a patient journey map. 

• Set clear goals . Define what you wish to achieve from your patient journey map. 
• Do not mix all the information in one map. Create different journey maps for different patient profiles . 
• Involve different stakeholders. Do not restrict it to one team or department for sharing their inputs. 
• Keep it simple . You may not need fancy tools or lots of graphics and colors; a simple spreadsheet can do the work. 
• Make it an iterative process. You may not have perfect journey mapping from the very first time. Take feedback, act on it, and improve all the way up.  

Benefits you can realize by mapping patient journeys correctly 

The goal of patient journey mapping is to improve patient experience across all touchpoints and derive better outcomes. In a nutshell, 

Investing in patient experience essentially takes away the cost of advertising and acquisition. It also boosts referrals, recommendations, and NPS at the same time. Uzodinma Umeh, Chief Medical Officer, Zuri Health

Here’s the drill-down of benefits you get by mapping patient journeys efficiently. 

1. Spot inefficiencies

Every time a patient expresses frustration or uncertainty about her next steps toward recovery, it’s an obvious sign that there are friction spots or unmet gaps in the healthcare system. A patient journey map can effectively battle such challenges and create a clear path for a patient’s progress.   

2. Improve communication

By mapping patient journeys providers can understand the drop-offs occurring because of communication gaps and take measures to rectify their strategies. 

3. Increase profitability 

Net margins for hospitals that provide “excellent” patient care are typically 50% higher than those for hospitals that offer “average” patient care. 

With a patient journey map, practitioners can identify the scope of improvement in operations and help their staff focus more on interacting with patients and caregivers. 

4. Reduce wait time for patients 

The average ER wait time in America is 145 minutes (even higher in some states; e.g., 228 minutes in Maryland, 195 minutes in Delaware, 176 minutes in Arizona, and so on). In India and other countries as well, it may take hours to get emergency admissions . These delays happen due to one or more of the following reasons: 

• Examination of patient 
• Time taken for consultation 
• Emergency investigations or imagining 
• Unavailability of vehicles for transport 
• Lengthy admission procedures 

By knowing what exactly is causing the delays and taking steps to correct them, providers can reduce waiting times for patients to a great extent. 

5. Improve patient outcomes 

A healthcare journey map can help identify the touchpoints where essential and relevant information can be shared with patients. Educating patients and keeping them abreast of their illnesses can lower their anxiety and bring better outcomes 

Tools to create a patient journey map 

As a matter of fact, you can use any UI design tool (e.g., Figma , Sketch , FullStory , etc.) to create a journey map.  

However, there are dedicated tools to create journey maps with ready-to-use templates to make your work faster and easier. Some of which are: 

• Creately  
• TheyDo  
• Custellence  
• Miro  
• LeadSquared  

On a final note, you’ll be able to map your patient’s journey effectively when you’ve ample information about their interactions with your practice.  

Healthcare CRM software is the best tool to collect and manage patient interaction data and make them accessible for various purposes like creating a journey map. 

If you’re looking for one such tool, 

A patient journey is the series of steps patients take to book an appointment, consult a physician, and pursue treatment with your practice. It involves both online and physical interactions.

Patient journey mapping helps you understand your customers’ experiences while interacting with your practice. With this exercise, you get to know their pain points, identify opportunities for improvement, and take measures to improve your services.

Padma is a Content Writer at Leadsquared. She enjoys reading and writing about various financial and educational topics. You can connect with her on LinkedIn or write to her at [email protected].

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• What is Patient Experience & Why It Is Importance ?

A Comprehensive Guide to Patient Journey Mapping

• Author: Wavetec
• Published: January 26, 2024

Is regulating patient experience at your healthcare service a challenging task? If your patients leave the hospital unsatisfied with the service, we have a solution for you!

Patient journey mapping is vital in understanding your patient’s experience at every step of interaction with the hospital, whether virtual or physical. This allows you to empathize with your patients, facilitate their experience, and contribute in uncertain and stressful times.

Parallel to the patient’s journey, healthcare systems face increasing challenges in patient management, regulating space constraints, limiting healthcare providers, and budgeting. By mapping the patient journey , you can pinpoint the shortfalls in your management services, improve facilities, and increase patient turnout.

The patient journey map must be curated in detail, accounting for various touchpoints and patient perceptions. The most accurate method of measuring healthcare quality is pairing patient journey maps with patient satisfaction scores, such as the Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (HCAPHPS) and a Net Promoter Score (NPS) .

Higher scores speak volumes about your healthcare services, increase patient retention, and promise returns.

What is Patient Journey Mapping?

Patient Journey Mapping is a strategic tool in healthcare that visually illustrates the entire patient experience, from initial contact to post-treatment follow-up. It involves mapping out key touchpoints and stages, such as appointment scheduling, diagnosis, treatment, and aftercare.

This process allows healthcare providers to understand the patient’s pathway through the healthcare system comprehensively.

Amidst the changing landscape of the healthcare industry, patients look for service providers that offer a personalized experience. Besides renowned healthcare providers, patients look for a human-centric environment that provides timely and efficient services.

Moreover, modern consumer requirements demand a digital transformation of healthcare services.

Healthcare managers can use patient journey maps to visualize the blind spots and pain points in a patient’s experience. A distinguished healthcare service sees journey mapping as a powerful tool that tells about a patient’s well-being and connects care providers with their emotional journeys.

You can make your practices to be more empathetic and make a difficult journey seamless.

The Benefits of Patient Journey Mapping

Investing in patient experience mapping carries benefits for both parties, care providers and patients. We have highlighted some benefits of journey mapping below:

Improved patient communication

Identifying unaddressed patient issues helps build a connection with the patient. Keeping them at the model’s center and informing them of changes before their visit reduces frustration and confusion.

Continuous patient care

With a streamlined workflow, staff members and care providers can remove uncertainties from a patient’s care journey. An integrated healthcare system removes loopholes, such as overbooked appointments, which otherwise lead to negative patient feelings.

Personalized care

Given the nature of the treatment plans and services offered by the healthcare industry, a one-shoe-fits-all theory does not apply to the consumers. By integrating patient data with business models, you can provide a customized experience to the patients.

Turn-out increases when patients receive automated appointment reminders and physician availability updates.

Improved Efficiency

Patient journey maps identify the demand for time management and sensitivity in healthcare. Feasibility arrangements such as pre-booking appointments, receiving digital laboratory reports, and online consultations boost patient satisfaction.

Patient retention and profitability

Patient feedback is crucial to introducing or revising policies, growth opportunities, and consistent revenues.

Seamless Patient Journey

With our intuitive interface, patients can easily register, check-in, and monitor their queue status. This reduces their anxiety, improves their overall experience, and fosters a positive perception of your healthcare facility.

7 Key Stages in the Patient Journey

Patient journey mapping differs for each hospital or clinic, depending on the care level. Most tertiary care hospitals identify three key stages when patients experience mapping .

Touchpoints of each step may differ slightly in pregnancies, emergency services, and outpatient departments.

Let’s read about the details of each stage below:

1. Awareness:

• This stage often begins with recognizing symptoms, changes in health, or routine checkups revealing potential issues.
• Patients may notice something is amiss, prompting them to seek further information or professional advice.

2. Consideration:

• Information gathering kicks into high gear. Patients may research their symptoms, explore potential causes, and consider various treatment options.
• Seeking advice from healthcare professionals, friends, or family members becomes a key part of this stage.

3. Decision:

• Armed with information, patients make decisions about their course of action. This could involve choosing a specific healthcare provider, deciding on a treatment plan, or committing to lifestyle changes.
• The decision-making process may also involve discussions with healthcare professionals to ensure alignment with the patient’s values and preferences.

4. Engagement:

• This is the active phase, where patients interact with healthcare providers, undergo diagnostic tests, and initiate the chosen treatment plan.
• Open communication between the patient and the healthcare team is crucial during this stage to address concerns, clarify expectations, and ensure a collaborative approach.

5. Treatment and Recovery:

• The chosen treatment plan is implemented, whether it’s medication, surgery, therapy, or a combination of interventions.
• Recovery involves monitoring progress, managing potential side effects, and adapting the treatment plan as needed.

6. Follow-Up and Maintenance:

• Post-treatment, patients often enter a phase of follow-up care. This can include regular check-ups, monitoring for recurrence, and adjusting treatment plans as necessary.
• Lifestyle changes and ongoing self-care may be emphasized to maintain health and prevent future issues.

7. End-of-Life Care (if applicable):

• In cases of terminal illness, this stage involves compassionate and supportive care. Palliative care aims to enhance quality of life, manage symptoms, and provide emotional and spiritual support.
• This stage emphasizes open communication about end-of-life preferences and ensures a dignified and comfortable experience for the patient and their loved ones.

Analyzing the Patient Journey Map

Once you have designed a patient journey map for your service, the correct way of utilizing the maps is to identify the pain points. Next, we enlist and discuss some common hurdles patients face that delay prompt care, including internal and external factors or barriers to healthcare.

1- Pre-visit

• The patient feels anxious about the medical condition.
• The website needs more information about the healthcare facility to make patients satisfied. Your website must be SEO-friendly and listed on Google to regulate patient management.
• During this stage, missed phone calls and confusing appointment scheduling tasks lead to care provision delays.
• Limited communication with consultants before visiting

2- At the healthcare facility

• Filling out the pre-appointment questionnaire is time-consuming and makes patients uneasy.
• Lengthy waiting times and mismanaged queues for appointments reduces patient satisfaction. Patients waiting at the facility can be guided using digital signage that communicates announcements, turns, and navigates around the healthcare facility.
• Explaining old symptoms and information to the same care provider at every visit frustrates patients.

3- Post-treatment plan

• Billing and initiating the hospital discharge process is often tedious.
• Receiving feedback from patients to measure patient satisfaction.
• Unable to monitor the patient at home and set up follow-up appointments creates mistrust between the patient and the doctor.

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Leverage our healthcare queue management system’s data to make informed decisions to improve the patient experience. We have seen up to a 35% increase in patient satisfaction.

Patient Journey Mapping Template

We have designed templates of patient journey maps to help you make the best one for your hospital system. As shown in the samples, patients visiting different departments have specific touchpoints. For example, a patient scheduling his appointment for the outpatient department will research the clinic and the primary caregiver.

However, the primary concern for patients requiring urgent care will be prompt ambulance services and treatment. Despite the differences, all patient journey maps are based on three key stages: pre-hospital care, in-hospital care, and post-treatment plans.

Patient Journey Improvement Solutions

If you want to enhance patient flow management and boost patient satisfaction at your hospital, we recommend using pre-engineered solutions. There are many ways to improve the quality of service you provide to your patients.

One such solution is the Wavetec patient flow system. Adopting a digital healthcare system can optimize patient-doctor interaction and improve investment returns.

We have put together the most impactful solutions your facility can sign-up for each stage of the patient journey map. Here’s what they are:

• Online appointment and booking
• Queue management – People counting, WhatsApp Queuing, Queue management applications, Digital Signage
• Patient application
• Self-check-in kiosks
• Integrated manager dashboards and analytics
• Customer feedback reports
• Curbside pickups

Let’s learn about each solution and how it will benefit your healthcare center.

1. Simplify Online Appointment Booking

Before visiting the facility, patients can schedule online appointments and ticketing on the website or patient application with their preferred physician. This service allows your patients to book seamlessly, check-in and receive wait time or canceled appointment notifications. Satisfying your customer before they arrive mitigates their already-high worry levels.

2. Patient Management

Waiting in queues for examination rooms and healthcare providers is a major source of concern for patients. You can reduce perceived wait times by giving patients a virtual waiting room. This can be done by signing up for WhatsApp Queuing and the Queue Management Mobile App. These services give patients virtual tickets and wait time notifications, allowing them to manage time effectively.

Walk-in patients and patients with pre-booked appointments can also use automated, self-service kiosks at the facility to check in or reschedule appointments. Patients can scan the displayed QR code or use biometrics technology to receive tickets via SMS, Email or WhatsApp.

You can manage the patient count in the waiting area using a real-time counter and digital signage . This helps emergency case patients to navigate the hospital without confusion.

3. Promoting Patient Satisfaction

Many patients must visit the healthcare facility multiple times to collect laboratory reports, prescriptions, and medications. You can facilitate this tedious process by providing delivery and curbside pickup options. This regulates unnecessary traffic at your hospital and saves time for patients.

Investing in Patient Applications is a great marketing tool and a one-stop solution to patient worries. Individuals can learn more about your facility’s services, access laboratory reports, initiate billing, and receive updates and reminder notifications. This is particularly useful in conducting telehealth rotations with expecting mothers and palliative care patients who cannot visit the facility often.

4. Patient Feedback

Receiving your consumer’s feedback and solving their queries ensures a successful approach to patient journey mapping. Wavetec has designed a customer feedback solution to measure customer satisfaction and follow up on your staff’s performance.

Additionally, you can get a management portal for the hospital staff and care providers. This can be integrated with patient data to give healthcare providers complete information.

Softwares such as Spectra include dashboard analytics and reports on the performance of each department to help you identify the shortfalls. This will help you build a congregated team that runs operations smoothly in the patient’s best interest.

Studies have shown that facilities using solution experience up to a 50% decrease in missed appointments, optimizing resource utilization and increasing revenue.

The modern healthcare system requires providers to be more involved in providing a seamless patient experience. In this blog, we highlight the role of patient journey mapping to help you identify touchpoints in a patient’s journey. Before, during, and after treatment, it is crucial to comprehend the patient’s viewpoint to ensure proper care.

Patient journey solutions are, therefore, integral in distinguishing your healthcare facility. Investing in patient applications, queue management software, receiving customer feedback, and analyzing it is vital in improving your standing.

Adopt our solutions, transform the healthcare industry, and make your approach more empathetic!

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The Step-by-Step Guide to Patient Journey Mapping

by Gaine Solutions | May 18, 2022 | Healthcare , Life Sciences

Customer journey mapping has been used for years in marketing and customer service. Now healthcare realizes journey mapping’s potential when used in the biotech and life sciences industry. Patient journey mapping offers providers and researchers a complete view of patients and their respective environments, which will help them mitigate risks and achieve more favorable outcomes.

Learn the five steps for patient journey mapping using big data and customer experiences and how it will help you offer patient-centric care.

Key Takeaways:

• Patient journey mapping outlines a patient’s journey from first realizing their health concerns through treatment.
• A patient’s journey map tells providers and researchers where common risks arise and how to influence patients for better outcomes.
• You need to collaborate with health care providers to ensure your patient journey mapping is complete.
• Big data, artificial intelligence, and digital technology make patient journey mapping possible in healthcare.

What is Patient Journey Mapping?

Patient journey mapping  is tracking and analyzing your patient’s experiences, touchpoints, and treatment from when they first noticed symptoms or an issue through to their outcome. A patient map includes:

• Medical records
• Medications they took
• Prescriptions they refilled
• Treatment or therapies they underwent
• Lifestyle choices they make (like exercising or diet)
• Doctor or care visits
• Survey results

Image source: Voxco

These pieces help providers create a complete picture of how effective their treatment was or why a patient stopped treatment because they can understand a patient better and any influencing behaviors. In addition, when providers see how each piece plays a part in the patient’s outcome, they can also identify specific areas of concern or risks to avoid.

Why Patient Journey Mapping is Important

Healthcare and life sciences want to deliver top-quality care while minimizing costs and offering a positive experience for patients. However, with scattered patient information or incomplete records, that has been difficult in the past. Additionally, those in biotech and life science have traditionally worked through a healthcare system when delivering care, which puts further distance between them and the patient journey.

That scenario is no longer the case because of new digital technology like artificial intelligence and platforms that can collect and organize  big data in healthcare .

Today, patients can access their healthcare information for themselves. This allows them to research their diagnosis and approach providers directly instead of going through their primary care physician or other medical providers.

This technology also helps those in healthcare and life sciences to understand more about patients and deliver better treatment options. As a result, you have a clearer picture of your product’s effectiveness and where you should adjust your treatment options to improve the patient’s experience. The information you gain from patient journey mapping in life sciences and biotech will also help you write educational material because you will have more accurate and specific instructions for patients based on real situations.

Below is a patient journey map example for a pneumonia patient.

Image source: NIH

5 steps to map your patient journey in healthcare and life sciences.

Take these five steps to help you create a patient journey map for healthcare and life sciences.

Video: Pharmaceutical Industry JOURNEY MAPPING in 3 Steps for Patients and HCPs

1. understand your purpose.

You wouldn’t start a journey without knowing your destination, and neither should you create a customer journey map without knowing your purpose for treatment.

One patient can generate nearly 80 megabytes of  medical data  annually. Without focus, you can easily drown in that amount of information and have a difficult time making relevant and valuable connections. Knowing your end goal will help you focus and organize your data.

2. Connect with Potential Patients

Once you have your goal, you are ready to begin mapping your patient’s journey, which starts with touching base with patients. You can bring patients in through your website, SEO,  social media , or your network of providers.

When patients first contact you, you will want to start gathering relevant information that will help with patient mapping, including demographics, finances, and their medical history.

3. Gather Patient Health Data

Collecting data about your patients will many times be an active task. While automation and artificial intelligence can pick up passive information, you will also have to send out surveys and contact the patient to get feedback on their treatment throughout the process.

You will need data from every point along their journey from their first symptoms, consultations, costs, side effects, and influencing factors when a patient chooses to stop treatment. This data is relevant because it can help you find ways to avoid scenarios that might prevent patients from getting the treatment they need.

4. Partner with Other Medical Personnel

You must create a  patient 360 view  of each person you are mapping to understand their journey fully. This is a single view of the patient and their data instead of trying to analyze scattered information from siloed sources.

If you limit yourself to the information you can access, you will only see half the picture. Your patient’s primary care physician and other healthcare providers are key players in your patient’s journey map.

Digital health monitoring devices, electronic health records, and contacting providers directly are all ways you can get relevant data on your patient’s other medical touch points.

5. Consistently Check-In with Patients

Your patient wants information about their drugs, treatments, and procedures, and if they don’t get that information from you, they will go to outside sources. You can help control your patient’s journey and stay involved as their most trusted medical advisor and influencer by being a valuable source of information.

As your patient undergoes treatment, take time to contact them consistently and provide thorough records and information. This will help relieve your patient’s minds and answer their questions to avoid misinformation they might receive if they search for answers elsewhere. For example, Google reports that 7 percent of  searches are health-related . Those are questions patients are asking a search engine over their provider.

Staying in touch will also build trust with the patient, which will help them feel more comfortable when sharing information. You may even receive more information from patients because they know they can trust you. This information will help you keep your patients on a journey to success.

Unify Your Customer Data in One Source

Your patient journey map will save you valuable time and resources while positively influencing patients’ outcomes. In addition, you can optimize your patient journey mapping in biotech and life sciences through a unified data collection and analytic tool, so you never worry about siloed or missing information again.

Contact us  to learn about our platform that will help you map your patient’s journey and provide the best care.

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Patient Journey Mapping: Making Healthcare Experience Better for All

If you’ve been reading Qminder blog, you’ve heard of customer journey mapping — a way to analyze how customers are handled by your service system.

But this doesn’t only apply to retail. In healthcare, there is such a thing as patient journey mapping .

Patient journey mapping is a way of visualizing the service experiences of patients over time. It shows the sequence of all the touchpoints a patient goes through during the treatment process.

This includes the touchpoints that occur pre, during, and post-visit.

Patient journey mapping helps visualize the patient experience . For the care providers, it makes it easier to adjust the care process, identify pain points and opportunities for innovation, and eliminate potential blind spots.

But don’t simply take our word for it. Let’s review, together, what makes patient journey mapping a crucial part of improving healthcare experiences.

The touchpoints of patient journey mapping

As we’ve mentioned earlier, there are three types of touchpoints to patient journey mapping:

What does every step involve and what are some ways you can make them better from the get-go? Let’s take it from the top.

Pre-visit encompasses everything a patient needs to do before getting to the “care” part of healthcare. This may include having an online consultation, choosing the right venue/service/practitioner and, optionally, booking an appointment.

This touchpoint encompasses the arrival of a patient, going through reception, patient case management, queuing, waiting, and the actual service/care.

If we’re talking about a walk-in patient (one who did not make an appointment), this is the step where patient check-in occurs. Incidentally, this is also where a lot of hospitals fail.

The problem is, many medical facilities still choose to use so-called sign-in sheets .

Normally, we advise against using such sheets, not in the least part because they are incompatible with HIPAA . There are other causes for concerns, too: sign-in sheets take too much time to fill out and handle, and eat up too many resources.

As more and more digital patient check-in options emerge, sign-in sheets are becoming obsolete. The way forward for patient experience is paved by patient self-management and decentralization of waiting areas .

Regarding the latter, getting rid of waiting areas has the benefit of not only reducing stress, but also minimizing infection rates.

If you want to learn more about the adverse consequences of long hospital lines, read our article The Effects of Waiting in Healthcare .

(A simple stat for you: 30% of patients experiencing long wait times leave before seeing the doctor , and 20% change their healthcare providers altogether .)

The care process doesn’t end once the doctor waves you farewell and closes the door behind you.

The post-visit part of hospital visits is centered around patient feedback in the form of questionnaires, surveys and other means of collecting opinions.

Getting patient feedback is essential to improving patient experience, patient satisfaction , quality of care and, ultimately, patient retention. The reason why is patients’ unique, first-hand perspective.

Despite years of expertise, or maybe even partly due to it, physicians develop blind spots for present issues in the care process. That’s why reducing wait times in hospitals is such a huge effort.

When it comes to patient care, conjectures are not enough. You need to base your decisions on experience-based patient surveys if you want to learn the harsh truth about the quality level of your care.

The benefits of patient journey mapping

The core idea behind patient journey mapping is that it’s important to understand how patients proceed through the care delivery system.

There are many components to your typical hospital visit, and no single member of staff can probably see the entire picture and judge how well the care machine is oiled.

The only method of gaining a comprehensive overview is through — you guessed it — patient journey mapping.

As a result, you get to achieve all of the below:

Streamline processes and workflows: optimizing patient flow in healthcare is something that not only raises patient satisfaction, but also helps cut expenses.

Improve communication with patients: even something as simple as [greeting a patient can help alleviate their stress, anxiety and pain](/blog/queue-management/importance-greeting-patients/!

Increase staff efficiency: equipped with clear guidance, hospital staff can anticipate and solve problems more easily, which in turn improves the level of their own experience .

Continuous improvement: patient journey maps offer data-backed insights into the quality of care, making it easier to make informed, company-wide decisions.

Mapping patient journeys

As explained above, patient journeys are complex and multidimensional. So it goes without saying that there are many different problems that analyzing patient journeys can uncover.

From multiple hand-offs (handing a patient to another specialist) and duplication of processes to suboptimal use of staff’s time, etc.

When mapping patient journeys, you need to look hard at how the care process is structured and ask yourself these questions:

• How many times hand-offs occur?
• What are the longest delays/bottlenecks?
• What is the approximate time taken for each step?
• What is the wait time between each step?
• Is the task at each step undertaken by the most appropriate staff member?
• Are there duplicate or reoccurring steps?

The purpose of patient journeys is to understand what happens to the patient at any given time, and examine the process for potential bottlenecks, of which there are two types: process bottlenecks , and functional bottlenecks .

Process bottlenecks occur with the steps that take a long time to complete, due to inherent complexity of the operation.

On the other hand, functional bottlenecks cause disruptions due to high demand from a number of sources. Radiology, pathology and radiotherapy are typically referred to as functional bottlenecks.

While the first type of bottlenecks is hard to fix, unless medical technology advances, we can help hospitals with functional bottlenecks.

Sure, healthcare is unlike retail, but there are similarities when it comes to the issue of queuing, which is all about the balance of supply and demand .

Improving patient queue management should not be the only item on your list, but it is a crucial aspect of patient experience. Patient retention is decided, to a large extent, by how well your wait time management is organized.

There are already many digital queuing systems out on the market, so instead of spending time and resources on engineering an in-house solution, you should get the one that fits your needs the most.

Bonus: List of 25+ Patient Queue Management Systems

The Qminder wait management system is used by dozens of hospitals, clinics and other health providers. Get a 14-free trial to see what we offer , or schedule a demo to see Qminder in action .

Qminder gives you the tools, and the data, to correctly map out your patients’ journey.

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Empowering healthcare journeys for patients and physicians

Decision journey mapping continues to evolve across the healthcare sector, physician journey mapping in the digital age, process mapping physician and patient journeys, the patient-centric journey framework, developing a more useful patient journey mapping template, patient-centric framework in action, uncover insights that inform your physician engagement strategy, the healthcare journey mapping experts.

In today’s digital world, traditional pharmaceutical promotion has been significantly disrupted. The rise of patient consumerism means that patients are increasingly empowered by expanding information and choices. They are confident and willing to take greater control of their own health.

As a pharma marketer, do you know which triggers and touch points are most impactful for both physicians and patients, and how to maximize your influence there? Which product features should you leverage in your communication strategy, and what will persuade formulary committee members to recommend your product?

It isn’t just the consumer journey being disrupted. For many years, sales representatives, advisory boards, and brochures have been the gold standard in communication between pharma companies and physicians. Now, medical professionals can be as much as 70 percent through their decision journey before they even talk to your sales representatives.

It’s time to rethink traditional physician engagement strategies to reflect this fundamental shift in the way medical professionals are engaging with your company. Key to this is a foundational understanding of physician decision journeys at they play out today.

Whether patient or physician, every decision journey is different. Meanwhile, the traditional decision journey is constantly being disrupted by new information, options and influencers. This is where decision and customer journey mapping comes in, revealing to you the evolving behavior patterns of how your customers research and buy products and services and providing actionable insights that you can take back and implement across all levels of your business.

Choosing the right journey framework is the critical first step in mapping your customers’ current decision journeys.

Traditionally, the patient journey framework has taken more of a product-oriented view than a patient view. As the pharma commercial model continues to evolve into one that is more patient-centric, a new framework is emerging, one that actually centers around patient need-states, emotions and behaviors.

Using this framework, pharma brands can overlay clinical and treatment approaches and uncover gaps in patient experiences. Through this approach, pharma brands can realign brand messaging, digital assets and patient support programs with patient needs at sub-journeys and other key moments.

The key to applying this patient-centric framework is to look at a different starting point—patient need-states—regardless of treatment events or even disease indications. Sometimes, a co-morbidity from another disease reveals significant patient unmet needs, which would be missed with a traditional journey framework. A patient-centric view can avoid the tunnel-vision associated with a single disease, treatment or product.

By prioritizing sub-journeys and key moments, this framework breaks the perception that a patient journey is a large-scale, check-off-your-list and once-in-a-commercial-lifecycle project. Instead, it becomes laser-focused and ongoing, creating immediate commercial impact even post-launch.

While it did take the patient perspective, the traditional patient journey was largely a treatment journey. A list of 20 possible interventions at 20 different leverage points lent itself well to visual representation, but offered little help for prioritizing actionable ideas for the marketers and researchers working in the industry. To produce a more useful patient journey mapping template, we have adopted two techniques:

• First, patient journeys are divided into sub-journeys. Focusing on specific points in time rather than the full spectrum of the patient journey helps focus on the stage where a brand would have the most impact.
• Second, patients are encouraged to identify key moments, as opposed to a range of activities that solidified their decisions, such as the decision to seek treatment. Diving deeply into these key moments helps brands focus on the most critical experience gaps.

We’ve assisted numerous pharma brands over the years with the process of mapping patient journeys. In this case, a pharma brand engaged us to conduct patient journey research to support a new product launch in the neurological space.

Traditional qualitative journey research often lacks focus given the sample size limitation, so we started with patient need-states, as opposed to treatment events. Our research identified a new stage, completely defined by patients. This new critical stage, which occurs prior to symptom stage – the starting point of a traditional treatment-centric framework – would have been ignored, had it not been for a patient-centric approach.

To drive the actionability further, our research focused on key moments for each patient need-state (as opposed to a wide range of potential leverage points), which brought focus to the qualitative research journey.

Maximizing your influence over physician engagement means identifying granular insights into physician touchpoints and relevant content expectations. While your competitors continue to focus solely on patient journey mapping, connecting the dots between digital, traditional media and sales force against healthcare professionals’ decision journeys represents a phenomenal opportunity for you to gain a cutting edge.

To inform your physician engagement strategy, we apply our decision journey framework, helping you focus on the journey lenses that would be most impactful and put touchpoint patterns in context. Leveraging in-the-moment mobile qualitative research platforms enables you to get a step closer to the understanding of unconscious media exposure and behaviors. Using our interactive visual touchpoint mapping tool, we are able to provide you with a robust, holistic and quantitative analysis of physician decision journeys.

As the continuously evolving omnichannel environment continues to disrupt established customer journey norms, brands from across healthcare and pharma segments are turning to healthcare journey mapping experts   for actionable insights they can take back to their organization.

We have extensive experience reconstructing decision journeys from physicians as well as patients via our interactive mapping tool, using quantitative and in-the-moment qualitative research techniques.

What’s more, we will identify tipping points and patterns that are driving uptake of your product, arming you with insights needed to decide where and how to invest your marketing spend for the highest return.

Our healthcare industry specialists have an unrivaled track record of providing great answers to these and similar questions. It’s why global healthcare companies such as Bayer HealthCare, Eli Lilly, Pfizer, and Sanofi-Aventis come to us for conjoint analysis, maximum differential scaling, qualitative research and more.

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Navigating excellence: The vital role of patient journey mapping in healthcare organizations

It's important to recognize that in the dynamic landscape of healthcare, every medical practice, regardless of size or reputation, faces competition.

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In today’s landscape of healthcare consumerism, where patient expectations mirror the convenience of Amazon and the high touch of a Ritz Carlton experience, healthcare organizations are challenged to redefine their approach to patient pathways and customer service.

Whether you are in a very competitive area or the sole provider in the immediate area, it's important to recognize that in the dynamic landscape of healthcare, every medical practice, regardless of size or reputation, faces competition. The evolving needs of patients , advancements in care, and shifts in delivery models contribute to a continually changing environment. Leading with this mindset allows practices to stay at the forefront and make informed decisions that will benefit both their practice and the patients they serve.

One powerful tool available to leaders to meet this challenge is Customer Journey Mapping (CJM). This strategic practice involves reviewing the current patient flow and envisioning ideal pathways that drive towards patient acquisition and satisfaction. CJM begins with the first point of contact (normally engagement with a marketing tactic) through becoming a patient for the long term. As leaders, it’s important to explore the significance of CJM for healthcare organizations and learn about its ability to identify service gaps, minimize leakage points, streamline patient flow, and ultimately increase engagement, positive reviews, and revenue. Working through this process will position your practice as a thoughtful and engaging leader in the space.

A view of the current landscape

Organizations must first understand the existing journey patients undertake in order to provide an exceptional healthcare experience. Customer Journey Mapping enables healthcare providers to walk in the shoes of their patients to better understand the highs and lows of their healthcare journey with your organization. From the initial point of contact, such as online searches or social media engagement to navigating your website to scheduling appointments, to the actual patient visit and follow-up care, every touchpoint shapes the patient's perception of your organization.

Your first step in this process is to map out your patient’s current flow. Think through how they are hearing about you, what are your calls to action, where are you sending them for more information, how do they access your practice or schedule appointments, what is the process for new patients, what is the experience at their first visit and how do you continue to engage with them post visit. It’s a great idea to get team members from all areas involved, as each will look through a different lens and together you will create a full picture. Laying it all out can be a significant learning experience for your team and in most cases, areas for improvement will jump off the page.

Minimizing leakage points

Leakage points, where consumers or patients may drop out and seek services elsewhere, provide an opportunity for improvement and growth. With the right data in hand, you may identify things like heavy web traffic but minimal conversion, unanswered phone calls, reviews highlighting frustrations that go unanswered, appointment cancellations or low repeat visits. CJM helps organizations identify these potential exits and implement strategies to plug the leaks. By addressing these points of departure, your practice can enhance consumer and patient experience ensuring higher levels of engagement with your practice and increased acquisition and conversion.

Identifying service gaps

CJM allows organizations to pinpoint critical service gaps in the patient journey. By analyzing the current experience, healthcare providers can identify areas where patient needs may not be adequately met. Does your website clearly show office hours, contact information, and allow for online scheduling? When they call the office, how long do they sit on hold, does your team provide a welcoming and caring experience?What does your new patient process look like and are there ways to add in personal touches? Are there areas in the process where you notice great success and conversion?Either way, you are beginning to create a clear picture which will help you focus on the right things.

Whether it's communication breakdowns, inefficient processes, or technology shortcomings, understanding these gaps is the first step toward delivering a more patient-centric experience.

Streamlining patient flow

Efficiency is key in healthcare delivery. CJM provides insights into the flow of patients through your practice, enabling you to streamline processes. Many times, practices will uncover duplicate work or areas that could be automated.From appointment scheduling to discharge procedures, a well-mapped patient journey ensures that each step is optimized for both the patient's convenience and the organization's operational efficiency.

Increasing engagement and positive reviews

In the age of healthcare consumerism, patient satisfaction and engagement are cornerstones of success. Delivering a modern, digital patient experience used to be a competitive advantage.Now, it’s a business imperative for all.CJM helps practice leaders tailor their services to meet patient expectations, fostering greater engagement. Research shows that patients overwhelmingly prefer digital communication for five key interactions:scheduling appointments, filling out registration and other forms, accessing their medical record, paying their bill, and asking a question.When creating ideal pathways, practices will want to keep this in mind and ensure they are meeting the needs of their patients.Creating these positive experiences not only leads to high levels of satisfaction, but also encourages patients to share their positive experiences through reviews and testimonials. These testimonials, in turn, serve as powerful marketing tools, attracting new patients and building a positive brand reputation.

Optimized pathways to success

As the expectations of healthcare consumers continues to rise, the importance of Customer Journey Mapping cannot be overstated. By taking the time to thoughtfully examine and optimize the pathways your patients must navigate, you can create an exceptional experience that goes beyond clinical care. This dedication to understanding and enhancing the patient journey leads to increased preference, patient acquisition, and ultimately, revenue growth. In the pursuit of delivering healthcare that mirrors the convenience of Amazon and the high touch of a Ritz Carlton experience, Customer Journey Mapping stands as a guiding compass for healthcare organizations navigating the path to excellence.

Kirstan Cecil   is the founder and CEO of   KC Business Growth Consultancy , a company that specializes in strategic marketing plans, customer journey mapping and internal communications and engagement programs.She can be reached at   [email protected] .

Helen Combs   is the founder and CEO of HBC Consultancy, a company that specializes in strategic planning and growth, medical practice and clinical research development and expansion and driving best of class experiences for customers, patients, employees, and referral partners.She can be reached at   [email protected] .

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