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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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Patient Journey Mapping In 2023, Guide + [Examples & Template]

Sliman M. Baghouri

Patient Journey Maps are the secret ingredient to a thriving medical business. Let’s discuss how to implement this strategy for your practice in under 3 days.

Imagine you have the ability to hand-craft the perfect patient experience, tailored specifically to your brand. An experience that skyrockets patient retention, doubles your profit margins and creates cult-like loyalty to your medical business.

This is exactly what I’ll share with you today. We’ll go through what are patient journey maps, how to use them, and how they can catapult your practice to the next level.

Other topics I will discuss are:

What is a Patient Journey?

• What is Patient Journey Mapping?
• What are the benefits of this strategy?
• Step-by-step process to implement your patient journey mapping workshop
• Examples of patient journey mapping
• Free patient journey mapping templates to use
• The secret to a fruitful patient journey map

Let us dive in.

A Patient Journey (A.K.A customer journey) is a series of events the patient goes through from his/her first interaction with your medical business up until post-treatment. It outlines every touchpoint (point of contact) the patient comes across during the whole patient experience.

What is a Patient Journey Mapping?

A Patient Journey Mapping (PJM) is the act of tracking, optimizing, and enhancing all of the events that happen during the patient journey. Think of it as creating a map to the whole patient experience and proactively looking for hidden issues across all of your touchpoints.

What are the benefits of patient journey mapping?

There are endless benefits to patient journey mapping. So let’s check some of the important ones.

1) Lets you uncover the blind-spots in your medical business

The most wicked, money-draining issues we face are the ones that hide in plain sight. It’s easy to get tunnel-versioned on the “obvious” and skip past critical parts of your business. This is where patient journey mapping comes into play. It hones in on the easy-to-miss spots in your practice and extracts the invisible layers of hindrances.

This way you make sure that your practice growth is not held off by small and hard to pinpoint bottlenecks.

2) It allows you to craft a personalized patient experience

A great benefit of patient journey mapping is that it lets you overhaul the whole patient journey the way you want it. It enables you to sketch the perfect patient experience based on what you want the patient to feel, experience, or know. This is an opportunity for you to fully tailor every aspect of your medical business to be personalized and boost their retention.

3) It skyrockets patient retention

Due to the enhanced communication and personalization in the patient experience, patient retention will soar. Patient journey mapping enables you to better connect with the patient and sympathize with their state throughout the treatment experience. This way of communication with the patients shrinks the “psychic distance” between the patient and your medical brand. Therefore building stronger relationships and affinity for your practice.

4) It increases profit and accelerates your medical business growth

According to recent research by Aberdeen Group , businesses that perform customer journeys see exponential growth year after year. Those growth spikes include:

• 18X faster average sales
• 56% up-sell revenue
• 10X improvement in customer service costs
• 5X greater revenue from customer referrals
• 54% greater ROI (return of investment)

These unmatched growth results are the outcome of a great journey mapping. Enhancing your patient experience from start to finish will be a fruitful endeavor in terms of profit-growth.

5) It provides alignment among your staff

Patient journey mapping is a collaborative strategy by nature. Key stakeholders need to attend the workshop to see the bigger picture of the patient experience. This collaborative environment will align all of your team under one umbrella, ensuring that everyone is on the same page and vibrating at the same frequency. This will create consistency and harmony between all of your team which will result in a seamless experience for your patients.

Step-By-Step Process: how to create a patient journey map:

Now that you know the importance of the patient journey, let’s dive into the process of how to implement it with your medical business.

From our experience, the process usually takes between 2 days to 3 days. It shouldn’t take more than 3 days to fully complete your patient journey.

Let’s go through the stages one by one.

Day 1: Preparation Stage

The patient journey map is as good as the preparation behind it. On the first day, you’ll need to finish the following critical tasks:

1) Gather Insights and information

In this phase, you’ll start by collecting important data points that will help you during your patient journey mapping workshop. If you’re not sure what insights to gather, consider the following:

• Who’s the target patient your practice or hospital attracts? E,g: middle-aged moms, C-suite executives, or maybe you’re cosmetic service and most of your patients are image-aware people like actors, politicians? If you don’t have an exact patient base, you can write down the ideal patients that you want to work with.
• Any relevant data from customer service chat logs, emails, or even anecdotal information from support, marketing team, or about the issues patients usually experience
• If your practice brand is active online, you might want to check data from analytics tools like Google Analytics or Facebook ads if you’re running digital advertising campaigns. That can give you some insight into what is happening across your online touchpoints
• Gather your testimonials from the patients, good and bad. This will help us understand the mind of your patient and what he thinks about your brand.

Don’t get caught up in this phase too much. The aim here is to capture rough ideas about the patients and their thoughts towards your brand. From our experience, we’ve found that large amounts of data do not fundamentally change the first hypothesis about the patient base.

2) Define the goals and the scope of your patient journey map

Defining the goals and objectives of the workshop is key to its success. It ensures that you’re on the right track and everyone is on the same page. It also makes it easy for you to measure the success of the strategy by checking back and seeing the progress that has been made towards the end goals.

Here are some questions to ask yourself when defining the scope of the workshop:

• What are the key aspects of the medical business you want to tackle?
• What are the desired outcomes you want out of this workshop?
• Do you have any hypotheses you want to confirm by performing a patient journey map?
• What are the ultimate results and end goals you’d like to achieve after acting-out on the patient journey map?

Answering these questions should give you a head start to defining the scope of the strategy.

3) Choose your team

Having the right people around when conducting PJM is important to a fruitful workshop. On the other hand, choosing too many people or the wrong team can hurt the outcome of the strategy.

From our experience 2-6 people are a manageable number. Any more than that and it will hinder the process of the workshop.

However, the key element here is to choose one stakeholder from each part of your business. Or if you’re a larger facility, a stakeholder from each department is a great option. Make sure that everyone in the team has gone through the scope and the goals of the PJM.

Day 2: The Workshop Stage

Now that everything is prepared, let’s dive into the details of the PJM and how to run the workshop.

Phase 1: Bring the necessary materials

There are two ways to run the workshop: online or in person. Both are fine but for the sake of convenience, I’ll use digital platforms to perform the PJM.

You can invite your team via Zoom and use collaborative virtual whiteboards like Miro or Mural . These online workplaces will make it easy for your team to join the workshop from the leisure of their homes.

But if you decide you’d like to run the workshop in person, the same principles will apply. But you’ll need to prepare stationery tools like pens, post-its of different colors, masking tape, and large sheets of paper to hang on the wall.

Phase 2: Start the workshop

This is the interactive part of the process. It takes roughly 1.5 to 2 hours to finish the complete first draft of the map.

Introduction ⏰ [5-10 minute]

• Introduce the exercise to the participant and explain why you’re doing this
• Explain the benefits of this exercise and the end goal of the PJM
• Recap the insights you gathered from your data and explain who your patient-base is.

Mapping Exercise ⏰ [60-90 minute]

The first thing to do is to present the patient’s journey map. The map consists of different stages, each stage contains specific steps the patients go through. Our goal here to hone in on these steps and pose questions regarding this particular step

• What are the questions they might be asking
• Are there any happy moments in this step?
• What are the pain points that the patient might experience?
• What opportunities could enhance this particular step?

Here’s roughly how the digital version of the patient journey should look like:

If you’re running the workshop in person, the PJM might look like this:

For each step ask participants to use sticky notes to answer the above questions. At the end of the exercise you should have something like this:

After you finish the first draft of the map, discuss with your team the observation and insights they made. It’s important to create a sense of collaboration during this exercise. Your team should feel involved and invested in the success of the strategy.

Wrap up the workshop ⏰ [5-10 minute]

After everything is said and done, offer a quick recap of what everybody has done today. It is important to inform the participant as to what’s coming next.

Day 3: The Final Stage

Now that the map is finished, all is left is to finalize the Map and provide a concrete plan for the whole team to start acting on.

• If you run the workshop in person, make sure to convert the map, insights, and notes into a digital format. This will make it more accessible for the whole team to go back and see the PJM
• Provide the team with a video or write-up about the strategy and the purpose behind it. Make sure to include how this can benefit the whole team and the brand overall
• Turn the insights and the results you got out of the PJM into an action plan. This plan should include what to do next at each step of the patient journey and what are the things that need to change. This is a critical part of the PJM. You want to act out the strategy to start seeing improvement and profit results for your medical business.

Patient Journey Example

I’ll share with you a recent example of the patient journeys map we conducted with our client so you can see roughly how the first draft of the map should look like.

Hospital Patient Journey

Here is Healthier™ ’s PJM, an Orlando-based community hospital:

For full screen click here or click on see board

The results of performing PJM

• Healthier profit margin nearly doubled from the first year of acting out the PJM
• The hospital start now is acquiring 4X the volume of last year
• The hospital patient retention rate increased from 12% up to 18% within the first year

The secret to a result-driven patient journey map

The Patient Journey Map is as good as the action-plan behind it. The last thing you want is unactionable PJM. You need to provide your team and your stakeholders with an action-based plan that goes through the next steps.

The steps that will redeem the pain-points of your patients, take advantage of the opportunities and make an unforgettable patient experience.

If you’re looking for help to facilitate your workshop or perform a patient journey map, drop me a message . I’d gladly help you.

• what is a patient journey
• what is a patient journey mapping
• what are the benefits of patient journey mapping
• step by step process how to create a patient journey map
• patient journey example
• the secret to a result driven patient journey map

Sliman M. Baghouri, Founder of unnus™, he's the co-author of unnus magazine and regular contributor in the healthcare marketing industry.

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Patient journey mapping: what it is, its benefits, and how to do it

We've all been patients at some point, but our journeys were not the same. Patient journey mapping holds the key to unraveling this mystery, providing a strategic lens into the diverse pathways individuals tread throughout their healthcare experiences.

In this article, we'll explore the pivotal role of patient journey mapping in the healthcare industry, uncovering its profound benefits for both providers and patients. From amplifying patient satisfaction to streamlining operational processes, the impact is transformative.

But how does one embark on this journey of understanding and improvement? We'll guide you through the essential steps and considerations, offering insights into the art of crafting a meaningful healthcare patient journey map.

Join us as we peel back the layers of patient experience journey mapping. This powerful tool not only illuminates the complexities of healthcare but also empowers providers to reshape and enhance the patient experience.

• 1.1 Difference from other customer journeys
• 2 Patient journey mapping benefits
• 3 Patient journey stages
• 4.1 Clinical journey maps
• 4.2 Service delivery maps
• 4.3 Digital journey maps
• 4.4 Chronic disease management maps
• 4.5 Emergency care journey maps
• 4.6 Pediatric patient journey maps
• 4.7 Palliative care maps
• 5 How to do patient journey mapping?
• 6.1 Patient-centered care
• 6.2 Streamlined access to care
• 6.3 Effective communication
• 6.4 Education and empowerment
• 6.5 Care coordination
• 6.6 Technology integration
• 6.7 Feedback and continuous improvement
• 6.8 Cultural competency
• 6.9 Emotional support
• 6.10 Efficient billing and financial assistance
• 7 Templates
• 8 Wrapping up 

What is a patient journey?

A patient journey is the entire process a person goes through when seeking and receiving a healthcare service. It covers everything from first noticing symptoms or realizing the need for care and medical attention to finally resolving the health issue. The journey involves patient interactions with healthcare professionals, diagnostic procedures, treatment activities, and follow-up care.

Mapping and understanding the patient journey can help boost the quality of hospital care and improve patient satisfaction. By pinpointing challenges, patient communication gaps, and areas for enhancement, care providers can refine their services to better cater to patients' needs. It also contributes to promoting patient-centered care, shifting the focus beyond just treating diseases to considering the overall well-being and experience of the patient.

Difference from other customer journeys

While the concept of patient journey mapping is similar to customer journey mapping , there are unique aspects specific to the healthcare domain. This is how a patient journey differs from any other customer journey:

• Emotional intensity. Health-related experiences often involve heightened emotions, including fear, anxiety, uncertainty, a sense of losing control, and a dependence on others. The emotional aspect is more pronounced in patient journeys compared to customer journeys in most industries.
• Complexity and uncertainty. Healthcare journeys often involve multiple stakeholders, various diagnostic and treatment options, and inherent uncertainties. Navigating these complexities requires a different approach compared to more straightforward consumer experiences. Comparing buying eyeglasses online and visiting a doctor — both are experiences, but how different they are!
• Regulatory and ethical considerations. Healthcare is heavily regulated, and ethical considerations play a significant role there. Patient journeys must align with regulatory standards and ethical principles that other industries don’t have.

• Clinical decision points. Patient journeys involve critical clinical decision points, such as diagnosis and treatment choices. These decisions not only impact the patient's health but also influence the overall trajectory of the journey.
• Care continuum. Patient journeys often extend beyond a single episode of care. They may involve long-term management, follow-up appointments, and ongoing support, creating a continuous care continuum.
• Interdisciplinary collaboration. Healthcare is often delivered by a team of professionals from different disciplines. The patient journey may involve collaboration among physicians, nurses, specialists, and other healthcare providers.

Patient journey mapping benefits

Mapping a patient journey offers a range of benefits that contribute to improving the overall quality of healthcare delivery. Here are some key advantages:

• Visualization of the entire patient journey helps healthcare providers identify critical patient journey touchpoints that impact patient satisfaction and experience and require immediate attention. By paying more attention to these touchpoints, you ensure a more positive overall journey.
• Gaps in care and challenges are highlighted among healthcare professionals. Addressing these issues ensures a more seamless and collaborative approach to patient care.
• Pain points and barriers become evident, enabling healthcare providers to proactively address issues that may hinder effective care delivery.
• Understanding individual patient journeys allows for more personalized ongoing care plans. Tailoring interventions to specific needs and preferences improves patient engagement and outcomes.
• By mapping a patient journey, you can identify resource-intensive stages and areas where efficiency can be improved, enabling a healthcare organization to allocate resources more effectively.
• It's a great way to identify opportunities for smoother transitions between different stages of care, ensuring continuity and preventing gaps in treatment.
• It becomes clear where patient involvement in the decision-making process can contribute to their healthcare journey.

Example: Tom, recovering from surgery, feels more empowered as his healthcare team provides clear post-operative care instructions, making him an active participant in his recovery.

In summary, patient journey mapping provides a comprehensive framework for healthcare improvement, addressing specific challenges at each stage and leading to tangible enhancements in patient experience, communication, and overall care delivery.

Patient journey stages

Patient journeys can differ, and if we take a broad perspective, some key stages would include:

Awareness 

This stage involves the patient recognizing symptoms and becoming aware of a potential health issue.

• Key considerations: Pay attention to how patients identify and interpret their symptoms, as well as the information sources they consult.

Example: John notices persistent joint pain and, through online research, suspects it might be arthritis. His journey begins with a heightened awareness of his symptoms.

Seeking information

Patients actively look for information to understand their symptoms, potential causes, and the importance of consulting a healthcare professional.

• Key considerations: Review the information sources patients use and how well they understand the need for professional medical advice.
• Example: Emily researches her persistent cough online, learning about various respiratory conditions and recognizing the importance of seeing a doctor for an accurate diagnosis.

First contact

This marks the initial interaction with the healthcare system, typically through scheduling an appointment with a primary care physician.

• Key considerations: Assess the ease of access to healthcare services and the patient's initial experience with medical professionals.
• Example: Alex schedules an appointment with his family doctor to discuss recent changes in his vision, initiating his journey within the healthcare system.

Diagnostic process

Patients undergo diagnostic tests to identify the root cause of their symptoms.

• Key considerations: Examine the efficiency of the diagnostic process and the clarity of communication about the tests.
• Example: Maria undergoes blood tests and imaging to determine the cause of her abdominal pain, marking the diagnostic phase of her journey.

Treatment planning

Patients receive a diagnosis, and healthcare providers collaborate on creating a personalized treatment plan.

• Key considerations: Evaluate how well the diagnosis is communicated and involve patients in treatment decisions.
• Example: Emily receives a diagnosis of rheumatoid arthritis. Her healthcare team takes the time to explain the condition, discusses various treatment options, and actively involves her in deciding on a comprehensive plan that combines medication, physical therapy, and lifestyle adjustments.

Treatment and clinical care service

Patients initiate the recommended treatment plan, experiencing the day-to-day challenges and improvements associated with their patient journey in a hospital.

• Key considerations: Monitor treatment adherence, side effects, and the patient's overall experience during this active phase.
• Example: Sarah starts chemotherapy for her cancer, navigating the treatment process with the support of her healthcare team.

Psychological support

Patients deal with the emotional toll of managing a health condition, including anxiety, frustration, or isolation.

• Key considerations: Acknowledge and address the emotional aspects of the journey, providing resources for mental health support.
• Example: James copes with the emotional challenges of managing chronic pain, seeking counseling to navigate the psychological impact.

Regular checkups

Patients undergo routine checkups to monitor their health status and adjust treatment plans as needed.

• Key considerations: Ensure consistent communication and scheduling of regular checkups to track progress and address any emerging issues.
• Example: Sarah, diagnosed with hypertension, attends regular checkups where the healthcare team monitors blood pressure, discusses lifestyle adjustments, and ensures medication efficacy. The routine checkups create a proactive approach to managing her condition.

Patients provide feedback on their experiences, allowing healthcare providers to refine and tailor their care.

• Key considerations: Establish mechanisms for patients to share feedback easily and transparently, encouraging an open dialogue.
• Example: John shares his experiences with a new treatment plan, providing feedback on its effectiveness, side effects, and overall impact on his daily life. This feedback loop allows the healthcare team to make timely adjustments and improve the patient's journey.

The stages may vary based on diverse scenarios and individual health circumstances. For instance, when a patient undergoes surgery or faces an acute medical event, the trajectory of their journey can diverge significantly from a more routine healthcare experience. 

Factors such as the need for emergency care, hospitalization, and specialized interventions can introduce unique stages and considerations. Additionally, variations may arise due to the specific nature of medical conditions, treatments, and the individual preferences and needs of patients. 

Recognizing this variability is crucial for comprehensive journey mapping, allowing for a more nuanced understanding of the patient experience across different healthcare contexts.

Types of healthcare journey maps

Healthcare journey maps can take various forms depending on their focus, purpose, and the specific aspects of the patient experience they aim to understand. 

Here are a few types of healthcare journey maps:

Clinical journey maps

Focus: Emphasize the clinical aspects of a patient's experience, including diagnosis, treatment, and recovery.

Purpose: Help healthcare providers understand the medical processes and interventions involved in the patient's journey.

Example: A clinical journey map for a cancer patient would detail the steps from initial symptoms to diagnosis, treatment modalities, and post-treatment care.

Service delivery maps

Focus: Highlight the various touchpoints and services a patient encounters throughout their healthcare journey. Then, detail the back and front processes your team does or has to do during each stage. 

Purpose: Enable healthcare organizations to assess the efficiency and effectiveness of service delivery.

Example: Mapping the service delivery for a patient undergoing surgery, including preoperative consultations, surgical procedures, and post-operative care.

Digital journey maps

Focus: Examine the patient's interaction with digital tools and technologies, such as online portals, mobile apps, and telehealth platforms.

Purpose: Help improve the digital aspects of patient engagement and communication.

Example: Mapping the patient's journey when using a telehealth platform for virtual consultations, prescription refills, and accessing medical records.

Chronic disease management maps

Focus: Explore the long-term journey of patients managing chronic conditions.

Purpose: Aid in understanding the challenges and opportunities for supporting patients in their ongoing self-management.

Example: A journey map for a diabetes patient would encompass regular monitoring, medication management, lifestyle adjustments, and periodic checkups.

Emergency care journey maps

Focus: Examine the patient’s experience during emergencies, from the onset of symptoms to emergency room admission and follow-up care.

Purpose: Help optimize response times, communication, and the overall emergency care process.

Example: Mapping the journey of a patient experiencing chest pain, from the initial call to emergency services to the triage process and subsequent cardiac care.

Pediatric patient journey maps

Focus: Tailored specifically for the unique needs and considerations of pediatric patients and their families.

Purpose: Address the emotional and practical aspects of pediatric healthcare experiences.

Example: Such a map is good for a child undergoing surgery to consider the role of parents, age-appropriate communication, and post-operative care.

Palliative care maps

Focus: Center on the patient's journey when facing serious illness, with a focus on providing comfort and support.

Purpose: Enhance the quality of life for patients and their families during end-of-life care.

Example: This kind of journey map suits a patient receiving palliative care when considering symptom management, emotional support, and coordination of services.

The mentioned types of maps cover different patient scenarios and clinical cases. There can also be "AS-IS" and "TO-BE" maps, reflecting the current state of the journey and the desired one, respectively.

All these types of healthcare journey maps offer a nuanced understanding of the diverse aspects of patient experiences, allowing healthcare providers and organizations to tailor their services to meet the unique needs of different patient populations.

How to do patient journey mapping?

Mapping a patient's journey is a thorough process that needs careful planning, teamwork, and analysis. Here's a guide on how to do it:

• Define the objectives

Clearly articulate the goals of the patient journey mapping exercise. Determine what aspects of the patient experience you want to understand and improve. All involved parties should be aware of these goals and agree with them.

• Assemble a cross-functional team

Form a team that includes representatives from various departments, including healthcare providers, administrative staff, patient advocates, and anyone involved in the patient experience.

• Do research

Conduct thorough research to gather quantitative and qualitative data related to the patient experience. This may involve analyzing patient records, studying existing feedback, diving into analytics and market research, and reviewing relevant literature on best practices in healthcare.

• Select a patient segment

Identify a specific patient segment or persona to focus on. This could be based on demographics, health conditions, or specific healthcare services. 

Tip: You can leverage your segments or patient personas to craft an empathy map , which is particularly valuable in healthcare.

• Conduct stakeholder interviews

Interview stakeholders, including healthcare professionals and administrative staff. Gather insights into their perspectives on the patient journey, pain points, and opportunities for improvement.

• Define the stages

Outline the patient journey by mapping out each stage and interaction with the healthcare system. This can include pre-visit, during a visit, and post-visit experiences.

Tip: To speed up the process, run a journey mapping workshop with your team. It will help with the next step, too. 

• Create the patient journey map

Develop a visual representation of the patient journey. This can be a timeline or infographic that illustrates each stage, touchpoint, and the emotional experience of the patient.

• Identify pain points and opportunities

Analyze the collected data to pinpoint pain points, areas of friction, and opportunities for improvement. Consider emotional, logistical, and clinical aspects of the patient experience.

• Review and validate

Consider collaborative journey mapping . Share the draft patient journey map with stakeholders, including frontline staff and patients, to validate its accuracy. Incorporate feedback to ensure a comprehensive and realistic representation.

• Develop actionable plans

Generate specific, actionable plans based on the identified pain points and opportunities. Each initiative should be feasible, considering resources and organizational constraints.

• Prioritize and implement changes

Prioritize the recommendations based on impact and feasibility. Begin implementing changes that address the identified issues, whether they involve process improvements, staff training, or technology enhancements.

• Monitor and iterate

Continuously monitor the impact of implemented changes. Gather feedback from both staff and patients to understand the effectiveness of the improvements. Iterate on the patient journey map and make recommendations as needed.

• Measure your success 

You can also establish KPIs to measure the success of any improvements made based on the patient journey mapping insights. These could include patient satisfaction scores, reduced wait times, or improved communication metrics.

•  Document insights (optional)

And keep a record of the lessons learned during the patient journey mapping process. This documentation can inform future initiatives and contribute to ongoing efforts to enhance the patient experience.

• Promote a culture of continuous improvement

Foster a culture within the organization that values continuous improvement in patient care. Encourage ongoing feedback and regularly revisit your journey map to ensure its relevance over time.

By following these steps, healthcare organizations can gain valuable insights into the patient experience, leading to targeted improvements that enhance healthcare quality and patient satisfaction.

How to improve the patient journey?

Striving for a seamless patient journey involves enhancing the overall experience that individuals have when seeking and receiving healthcare services. Here are some strategies to consider:

Patient-centered care

• Prioritize patient needs and preferences.
• Emphasize education and empower patients to actively participate in their healthcare journey.
• Foster open communication and active listening.

Streamlined access to care

• Reduce wait times for appointments and procedures.
• Implement online scheduling and appointment reminders.
• Provide options for virtual consultations when appropriate.

Effective communication

• Ensure clear and understandable communication with patients.
• Provide information about treatment plans, medications, and follow-up care.
• Confirm that patients are well-informed about the potential risks and benefits of treatment options.

Education and empowerment

• Offer educational resources to help patients understand their conditions and treatment options.
• Encourage patients to actively participate in their health management.
• Provide tools for self-monitoring and self-management when possible.

Care coordination

• Improve collaboration and communication among healthcare providers to strengthen care coordination, ensuring a more cohesive and seamless experience for patients throughout their healthcare journey.
• Define and implement standardized protocols for communication and handovers between care teams, reducing the risk of errors and ensuring continuity of care.
• Implement remote monitoring technologies to track patients' health remotely, enabling timely interventions and reducing the need for frequent in-person visits.

Technology integration

• Adopt electronic health records (EHRs) for efficient information sharing.
• Use telemedicine to enhance accessibility and convenience.
• Implement mobile health apps for appointment reminders, medication management, and health tracking.

Feedback and continuous improvement

• Conduct regular surveys to gather specific insights into patient satisfaction, allowing for a more nuanced understanding of their experiences.
• Establish easily accessible channels for patients to provide real-time feedback, ensuring that their voices are heard promptly.
• Respond promptly to patient feedback, address concerns, and communicate any changes or resolutions, fostering a sense of responsiveness and accountability.

Cultural competency

• Train healthcare staff to be culturally competent and sensitive to diverse patient needs.
• Promote diversity in healthcare staff to reflect the communities served, fostering a more inclusive and culturally sensitive environment.
• Recognize and celebrate cultural awareness events within the healthcare setting, fostering an inclusive atmosphere that appreciates the richness of diverse traditions.

Emotional support

• Address the emotional and psychological aspects of healthcare.
• Provide resources for mental health and emotional well-being.
• Consider support groups or counseling services.

Efficient billing and financial assistance

• Simplify billing processes and provide clear information about costs.
• Offer financial assistance programs for patients in need.
• Communicate transparently about insurance coverage and out-of-pocket expenses.

Staff training:

• Train healthcare staff in patient-centered communication and empathy.
• Ensure staff is knowledgeable about the resources available to patients.
• Foster a culture of empathy and compassion in the healthcare environment.

By focusing on these aspects, healthcare providers can contribute to a more positive and effective patient journey. Regularly reassessing and adapting strategies based on feedback and evolving healthcare trends is crucial for ongoing improvement.

UXPressia already has some healthcare journey map examples: 

• Surgical patient journey

This map focuses on the healthcare journey of a patient persona, Robin, from the moment when the patient understands that something is wrong to the recovery period. This journey is long and very detailed.

• Non-surgical patient journey

This map visualizes the journey of a patient, Lotta, who decides to undergo a checkup at a hospital. She schedules a visit, gets a consultation, takes some tests, and starts taking some medicine prescribed by her doctor.

More healthcare and well-being templates are available in our library.

Wrapping up 

In wrapping up, think of patient journey mapping as a powerful tool reshaping the healthcare landscape, with the patient's experience taking center stage. It's like creating a roadmap that intricately traces every step of a patient's interaction within the healthcare system. 

This deliberate mapping isn't just a plan; it's a compass guiding healthcare organizations toward key points where they can enhance patient satisfaction, simplify access to care, and cultivate a more compassionate and patient-focused healthcare environment. Investing in patient journey mapping is more than a strategy—it's a dedication to raising the bar in care quality, amplifying the patient's voice, and ensuring that every leg of the healthcare journey is characterized by empathy, understanding, and an unwavering pursuit of excellence in patient experience.

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The 1-2-3 Guide to Patient Journey Mapping [Template Inside]

by Gaine Solutions | Feb 28, 2024 | Healthcare , Life Sciences , Master Data Management

Patient journeys in today’s healthcare landscape are complex, spanning a number of platforms, systems, touchpoints, and interactions. As patients engage with healthcare providers through diverse channels, both digital and physical, the need for a structured and comprehensive approach to managing the patient journeys is evident. Patient journey mapping is the solution.

Patient journey mapping creates a high-level and holistic view of the patient journey that empowers healthcare providers to make the most informed and impactful decisions possible about how to enhance operations and care.

In this guide, we’ll walk step-by-step through the process of creating and implementing a patient journey map that drives better performance results and patient outcomes for your healthcare organization.

Key Takeaways:

• Patient journey mapping is crucial for understanding and enhancing the patient experience.
• Patient journey mapping leads to improved patient satisfaction, better clinical outcomes, and increased operational efficiency.
• Developing a patient journey map requires clear objectives, a cross-functional team, and data-driven approaches to gaining insight.
• Improvement strategies should be developed for each critical moment and touchpoint, with changes implemented and continuously monitored for effectiveness over time.

What is Patient Journey Mapping and Why Is It Important?

Patient journey mapping is the process of creating a detailed visualization of a patient’s healthcare journey, from initial contact through treatment and follow-up care, identifying every touchpoint along the way. This methodical approach helps healthcare providers see the care process from the patient perspective, including the highs, lows, and gaps in the patient experience.

The example below is from the U.S. Department of Veteran Affairs, and shows how intricate and complex the patient journey is once it’s mapped completely. This drives home the importance of documenting the journey visually in order to see it in a holistic way.

Image Source

When done effectively, patient journey mapping is a valuable tool driving more seamless, integrated, and patient-centered care. Journey mapping also helps healthcare organizations make informed decisions about where to allocate resources, how to streamline operations, and ways to personalize care to meet the unique needs of each patient.

In the end, the benefits of patient journey mapping are threefold:

• Improved Patient Satisfaction : Enhances the overall patient experience by addressing specific needs and preferences, leading to higher satisfaction rates.
• Better Clinical Outcomes : Identifies opportunities for early intervention and personalized care plans, contributing to improved health results.
• Increased Operational Efficiency : Streamlines healthcare processes by pinpointing inefficiencies and redundancies, leading to more effective use of resources.

It leads to 360-degree improvements that enhance clinical, administrative, and operational aspects of both the healthcare system and the patient experience. In the next section, we’ll walk through the steps you can take to develop a patient journey map for your organization.

Your Step-by-Step Patient Journey Mapping Template

1. identify the goals and scope of your map.

Begin by d eve loping a clear vision of what you aim to achieve through patient journey mapping. Whether it’s to enhance patient satisfaction, streamline healthcare delivery, or identify gaps in service, setting specific objectives will direct your mapping efforts. During this step, you should also determine the scope of your map (i.e. whether it focuses on a particular service line or the entire healthcare experience).

2. Gather a Cross-Functional Team

Assemble a team that represents a broad spectrum of roles within your organization, including clinicians, administrative staff, IT professionals, and cust ome r service representatives. Diverse perspectives ensure a holistic view of the patient journey, capturing insights from every facet of patient interaction. 

3. Map the Patient Touchpoints

Systematically list every interaction point between the patient and your healthcare system. This includes digital touchpoints like website visits, appointment scheduling portals, and social media interactions, as well as physical touchpoints like clinic visits, phone calls, and direct mail communication. Mapping these touchpoints requires a detailed understanding of the patient’s path through your system, from initial awareness through treatment and follow-up care.

4. Collect and Analyze Data

Leverage diverse data sources to understand patient experiences at each touchpoint. Collect patient feedback through cha nne ls like surveys, interviews, and comment cards. Analyze staff insights and review operational data. Look for patterns in behavior and satisfaction levels, and identify bottlenecks or pain points in the patient journey.

Having a centralized data management platform in place is crucial for this step—it provides a central repository for the data you collect as part of your patient journey mapping exercise, while also giving you seamless access to historical data in one location.

5. Visualize the Journey

Develop a visual representation of the patient journey. Use flowcharts, storyboards, or diagrams to depict the sequence of touchpoints and the patient’s experience at each stage. This visualization should be from the patient’s perspective, highlighting critical interactions, emotions, and decision points.

Tools like customer journey mapping software can facilitate this process, but even simple graphical tools or whiteboards can be effective.

6. Identify Moments of Truth

Highlight key moments in the journey that significantly impact the patient’s perception of care—things like first contact, diagnosis communication, wait times, and billing support. These are opportunities to make a lasting impression on the patient, and identifying them allows your team to prioritize areas for immediate improvement or innovation.

7. Develop Improvement Strategies

For each critical moment and touchpoint, evaluate what’s working effectively as well as areas for potential improvements. Call out specific gaps and pain points that may exist for the patient at every stage on your journey map. Then, brainstorm how to resolve them.

This may happen by introducing new technologies, optimizing existing processes, providing additional training for your staff, enhancing communication strategies, and more.

8. Implement Changes

Prioritize the identified improvements based on their potential impact and feasibility. Create a detailed implementation plan, assigning clear responsibilities and deadlines. Ensure there is a mechanism for tracking progress and measuring the impact of these changes on the patient experience and other goals and objectives you set at the start of the process.

9. Monitor and Adjust

Establish a continuous feedback loop to monitor the effectiveness of implemented changes. Use patient feedback, staff input, and performance metrics to assess progress. Be prepared to make iterative adjustments to your strategies based on this feedback, fostering a culture of continuous improvement.

Putting it All Together

Embarking on patient journey mapping is more than a strategic exercise—it’s a commitment to elevating the standard of care through a deep understanding of the patient’s experience. It represents a pivotal shift toward a more empathetic, patient-centric approach in healthcare, where decisions are informed by the nuanced needs and experiences of those we serve.

Gaine’s Coperor platform is a scalable, ecosystem-wide master data management solution designed for the unique challenges of the healthcare and life sciences industries. It creates a single source of data truth within an organization that makes initiatives like journey mapping possible. Learn more here or start your real-time Coperer demo today.

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Patient Journey Mapping Template

The patient journey map which outlines all of the patient touch points during each stage of the care journey aids in creating strategic outreach that improves both patient engagement and satisfaction.

You can easily edit this template using Creately's block diagram maker . You can export it in multiple formats like JPEG, PNG and SVG and easily add it to Word documents, Powerpoint (PPT) presentations, Excel or any other documents. You can export it as a PDF for high-quality printouts.

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Your complete guide to patient journey mapping

15 min read Healthcare organisations 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 organisation’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 organisation 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.

Discover how Qualtrics can enhance the healthcare industry

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 organisation. It recognises 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 organisation. Direct patient engagement with your organisation 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 centres 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 utilise 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 organisation over time.

Patient journey mapping helps stakeholders to assess the patient experience from multiple perspectives. Journey maps provide a way to visualise 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 visualise 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 organisation 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 organisation 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 organisation 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 organisation; 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 behaviours and preferences is a good way to differentiate the needs and more clearly understand the perspectives of the unique populations you serve.

• 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 organisation, 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 organisation 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 behaviours as they engage with your organisation.

Some steps the patient takes may not even include your organisation, 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 organisation but this is still a part of their care journey that may feed into their interactions with your organisation 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 organisation, 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 visualise 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

Utilise your patient journey map to prioritise 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.

Organisations 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 organisation, 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.

Related resources

Nursing shortages 13 min read, healthcare branding 13 min read, patient feedback 13 min read, patient experience: your complete guide 12 min read, symptoms survey 10 min read, quality improvement in healthcare 11 min read, nurse satisfaction survey 11 min read, request demo.

Ready to learn more about Qualtrics?

The complete guide to patient journey mapping

Last updated

3 June 2023

Reviewed by

Jean Kaluza

Every patient is on their own health journey, but is your organization getting the most out of every interaction?

Providing high-quality healthcare is an incredibly complex process. Many patients take an ever-changing path as they move through the healthcare system, making it hard to map out exactly what journey they will take. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try.

You can take a proactive approach to patient care by mapping out someone’s future steps before they even take them. Let’s get into the many benefits of patient journey mapping.

• What is a patient journey?

A patient journey is a step-by-step pathway that outlines every interaction a patient has with the healthcare system as they receive care. The length of each patient’s journey is unique to their specific situation, and it starts when they reach out to a healthcare professional.

Below are some examples of patient journey touchstones. They depend on the type and duration of care a patient needs.

Researching services

Booking appointments

Telehealth conversations

Specialist referrals

Care wait times

Diagnostic testing

Access to supportive services

At-home care and rehabilitation

• Patient journey vs. patient experience

Every patient journey is impacted by their experience. Patient journey and patient experience are related terms, but they have different definitions.

Patient journey

Defined as the pathway a particular patient takes as they interact with the healthcare system, a patient journey is a list of steps that varies depending on a person’s care needs.

The goal of patient journey mapping is to better understand the pathway and experiences a patient will have as they interact with an organization. When done correctly, this will facilitate more positive outcomes at every step of the way.

Patient experience

At every step of a patient’s journey, they build and develop an overall experience. Repeat exposure to kind and helpful healthcare professionals leads to a positive patient experience. Things like long wait times, sub-par patient care, and poor communication are all examples of factors that can create a negative patient experience.

• What is a patient journey map?

A patient journey map is a visual tool created by an organization looking to better understand how patients interact with their system. Created with key stakeholders in mind, the goal of a patient journey map is to gain helpful insights into:

When, why, and how patients access your services

The level of care they receive at every step of the process

Patient experiences and preferences

Any inefficient pathways that can be improved to boost patient retention and satisfaction

Using a patient journey map, your team can get a glimpse into how patients interact with your organization. You can use this to make improvements that increase patient retention.

• The five stages of the patient journey

While every patient’s health journey will be unique based on their specific needs, there are some consistent touchpoints that your team can monitor. This will give them a holistic view of the overall process.

In most cases, every patient journey follows these five steps:

1. Awareness

Awareness refers to two different types of patient realizations:

Identifying their personal need for care

Different people seek medical care at different levels of discomfort or disease progression. However, this factor isn’t something your organization can map out. The amount of care a person will need (and their journey moving forward) will depend on the severity of their presenting symptoms. This will dictate the urgency and level of care they require.

Becoming aware of your health organization

A patient will need to research their available options once they realize they need medical care. This phase of discovery and awareness includes reading reviews, talking to family and friends for recommendations, and looking on social media.

2. Consideration

Next, the patient has to weigh the pros and cons of receiving care from your specific organization. During this stage, the patient will ask themselves:

Does this organization provide the type of care I need?

Do they accept my type of health insurance?

Do they have good reviews?

Do I need a referral to book an appointment?

Positive responses to these questions are essential for ensuring that the patient continues along their journey to receiving care from your organization. This highlights the importance of tracking data for improved patient retention and experience.

If the patient decides to move forward with your organization, they then book an appointment and enter the access stage of their journey.

In order to increase the volume of patients who enter this stage and progress forward, your organization should focus on the following:

Appointment wait times

Patient engagement

Multichannel communication

Online and social media presence

4. Service delivery

Next, the patient arrives for their appointment to transition into the service delivery phase.

Aside from providing high-quality, compassionate, and effective care, your team should also prioritize the following:

Creating a safe and inviting in-office environment

Opportunities to improve patient experience during check-in and check-out

Patient relationship building

Billing and insurance claims

5. Continuing care

Finally, after receiving the service and treatments they need, the patient begins the final stage of their journey.

As part of continuing care, your organization can build a long-term relationship with patients. Finding ways to incentivize patient loyalty is a great way to book recurring appointments, allowing your organization to grow and expand.

• The four types of patient journey maps

With the following steps acting as a general outline, there are different types of patient journey maps that your team can make to learn more about your target audience. Here are some of the most commonly used patient journey maps:

1. Current state

A current state map gives you information about what’s currently occurring within your organization. This map includes information about how your current patients interact with your services, how they feel, and what they think.

Data collected for a current state patient journey map will act as a helpful baseline as your team begins to integrate initiatives to improve patient satisfaction.

2. Future state

A future state patient journey map is more of a hypothetical map. It’s created with your optimal pathway in mind. It’s a helpful resource for teams looking to identify areas of improvement. You can use it as a point of comparison to your current state information.

How does what your patient currently experiences compare to what you want them to? What can you do to improve this pathway in the future?

These questions can be discussed as part of your team’s brainstorming sessions when creating this type of journey map .

3. Day in the life

Instead of focusing on a generalized overall experience, a day in the life patient journey map is specific to a certain area of care or type of patient.

You can create a day in the life patient journey map using a patient persona. This is a set of descriptors of a particular group of people you regularly serve. Your day-in-the-life patient journey map will aim to show a detailed and accurate representation of how this patient interacts with your organization.

By factoring in unique situations and characteristics that describe a specific group of people, your team can collect valuable insights into how you can better serve and target these patients.

4. Service blueprint

As a combination of current state and future state patient journey maps, a service blueprint map acts as a simplified version of both.

By adding layers to the map, your team can factor in the people, processes, and potentially limited factors surrounding each unique interaction your patients have with your organization.

Photo recommendation: https://slidemodel.com/wp-content/uploads/21359-01-service-blueprint-powerpoint-template-16x9-1.jpg

The primary use of this type of patient journey map is to pinpoint the specific causes of patient satisfaction . Is a particular booking program sending out too many confirmation emails leading to patient irritation? Are wait times too long? Do your providers make a good impression on new patients?

This type of patient journey map allows your team to focus on small factors that may be causing large-scale issues. It’s a helpful resource as you change your current processes for better results.

• How to create a patient journey map

Creating a detailed patient journey map is a great place to start if your organization is looking to improve patient satisfaction and become a preferred provider in your local area.

No matter what type of medical services you provide, you can benefit from understanding the most common pathway to care for your patients.

Identify your audience

What types of patients do you usually serve? Do they have common traits and characteristics you can identify?

Every patient’s specific journey is different, but their overall journey forward will probably be quite similar. Taking the time to get specific about who you currently serve (and who you may want to serve in the future) is an essential early step in patient journey mapping. This information will be incredibly helpful as you look to improve your current system.

If you offer a wide variety of services or have varied patients, you may need to create multiple patient personas to truly capture your audience.

Specify patient goals

Now that you have a patient persona, your team needs to put themselves into the patient’s shoes and explore their motivations, concerns, and needs. The type of care you provide and its level of urgency will play a significant role in what motivates your patients to seek out your care.

Starting at the earliest stage of the journey, your team should consider every possible interaction a patient may have with your organization to get a full picture of their experience. The more detailed you can be, the better. These insights can be translated into actionable plans later on.

Establish patient steps

Next, do your best to map out how your patient would move through their journey with your organization.

Where do they hear about your services? How do they book appointments? Who will they talk to, and what recommendations will they likely receive?

It’s probably impossible for you to map a patient’s steps perfectly, but this activity helps shed light on your current process. Once you start collecting more information and data, you can update these steps to better represent the customer’s journey.

Research and uncover information

As your team begins to plot points on your patient map, you will quickly notice that new information and data from patients will change the original outline you created. And that’s okay!

New information and insights are the goals of this entire exercise. They allow you to improve on your current system to better serve your patients. As these changes develop, your team will gain further insights into the primary areas you need to address to improve your process. Over time, this will result in improved processes and happier and healthier patients.

• Perfect your patient journey map with Dovetail

Patient journey mapping is essential for improving your current health services. As tempting as it can be to focus your resources and time on other areas, mapping out your patient’s journey and learning about their experiences is a great way to gain valuable insights into areas you can improve.

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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.

Gain valuable insights

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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Patient Experience Mapping Toolbox

Understanding the patient’s journey with disease is critical as it enables understanding the context of the patient experience, the natural history of the disease from the patient perspective, and what is important to patients. However, there are no standardized tools or approaches, and there are few opportunities for shared learnings. Thus, patient-friendly tools are needed for capturing “real-world” patient experiences and the patient journey, leveraging sound existing materials and content.

The National Health Council (NHC) is focused on ensuring the patient’s journey is collected in standardized ways to inform patient-centric efforts in research, product development, and care delivery. We want to leverage the tools available and communicate shared learnings. To that end, we will develop a Patient Experience Mapping Toolbox.

By the end of 2020, the NHC will develop the  Patient Experience Mapping Toolbox . This toolbox will contain:

• a patient-driven, patient-friendly Patient Exeprience conceptual model along with;
• Related data-gathering tools;
• a user guide; and
• Example applications of its’ use.
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• Julie Fiol, RN, National Multiple Sclerosis Society
• Elise Hoover/Nicole Harr, PKD Foundation
• Newell McElwee, PharmD, MSPH , Boehringer-Ingelheim
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Read our blog, "Development of the National Health Council Patient Experience Mapping Toolbox."

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Article Contents

Introduction, why patient journey mapping, how is patient journey mapping conducted, use of technology in patient journey mapping, future implications for patient journey mapping, conclusions, patient journey mapping: emerging methods for understanding and improving patient experiences of health systems and services.

Lemma N Bulto and Ellen Davies Shared first authorship.

Conflict of interest: none declared.

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Lemma N Bulto, Ellen Davies, Janet Kelly, Jeroen M Hendriks, Patient journey mapping: emerging methods for understanding and improving patient experiences of health systems and services, European Journal of Cardiovascular Nursing , 2024;, zvae012, https://doi.org/10.1093/eurjcn/zvae012

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Patient journey mapping is an emerging field of research that uses various methods to map and report evidence relating to patient experiences and interactions with healthcare providers, services, and systems. This research often involves the development of visual, narrative, and descriptive maps or tables, which describe patient journeys and transitions into, through, and out of health services. This methods corner paper presents an overview of how patient journey mapping has been conducted within the health sector, providing cardiovascular examples. It introduces six key steps for conducting patient journey mapping and describes the opportunities and benefits of using patient journey mapping and future implications of using this approach.

Acquire an understanding of patient journey mapping and the methods and steps employed.

Examine practical and clinical examples in which patient journey mapping has been adopted in cardiac care to explore the perspectives and experiences of patients, family members, and healthcare professionals.

Quality and safety guidelines in healthcare services are increasingly encouraging and mandating engagement of patients, clients, and consumers in partnerships. 1 The aim of many of these partnerships is to consider how health services can be improved, in relation to accessibility, service delivery, discharge, and referral. 2 , 3 Patient journey mapping is a research approach increasingly being adopted to explore these experiences in healthcare. 3

a patient-oriented project that has been undertaken to better understand barriers, facilitators, experiences, interactions with services and/or outcomes for individuals and/or their carers, and family members as they enter, navigate, experience and exit one or more services in a health system by documenting elements of the journey to produce a visual or descriptive map. 3

It is an emerging field with a clear patient-centred focus, as opposed to studies that track patient flow, demand, and movement. As a general principle, patient journey mapping projects will provide evidence of patient perspectives and highlight experiences through the patient and consumer lens.

Patient journey mapping can provide significant insights that enable responsive and context-specific strategies for improving patient healthcare experiences and outcomes to be designed and implemented. 3–6 These improvements can occur at the individual patient, model of care, and/or health system level. As with other emerging methodologies, questions have been raised regarding exactly how patient journey mapping projects can best be designed, conducted, and reported. 3

In this methods paper, we provide an overview of patient journey mapping as an emergent field of research, including reasons that mapping patient journeys might be considered, methods that can be adopted, the principles that can guide patient journey mapping data collection and analysis, and considerations for reporting findings and recognizing the implications of findings. We summarize and draw on five cardiovascular patient journey mapping projects, as examples.

One of the most appealing elements of the patient journey mapping field of research is its focus on illuminating the lived experiences of patients and/or their family members, and the health professionals caring for them, methodically and purposefully. Patient journey mapping has an ability to provide detailed information about patient experiences, gaps in health services, and barriers and facilitators for access to health services. This information can be used independently, or alongside information from larger data sets, to adapt and improve models of care relevant to the population that is being investigated. 3

To date, the most frequent reason for adopting this approach is to inform health service redesign and improvement. 3 , 7 , 8 Other reasons have included: (i) to develop a deeper understanding of a person’s entire journey through health systems; 3 (ii) to identify delays in diagnosis or treatment (often described as bottlenecks); 9 (iii) to identify gaps in care and unmet needs; (iv) to evaluate continuity of care across health services and regions; 10 (v) to understand and evaluate the comprehensiveness of care; 11 (vi) to understand how people are navigating health systems and services; and (vii) to compare patient experiences with practice guidelines and standards of care.

Patient journey mapping approaches frequently use six broad steps that help facilitate the preparation and execution of research projects. These are outlined in the Central illustration . We acknowledge that not all patient journey mapping approaches will follow the order outlined in the Central illustration , but all steps need to be considered at some point throughout each project to ensure that research is undertaken rigorously, appropriately, and in alignment with best practice research principles.

Steps for conducing patient journey mapping.

Five cardiovascular patient journey mapping research examples have been included in Figure 1 , 12–16 to provide specific context and illustrate these six steps. For each of these examples, the problem or gap in practice or research, consultation processes, research question or aim, type of mapping, methods, and reporting of findings have been extracted. Each of these steps is then discussed, using these cardiovascular examples.

Examples of patient journey mapping projects.

Define the problem or gap in practice or research

Developing an understanding of a problem or gap in practice is essential for facilitating the design and development of quality research projects. In the examples outlined in Figure 1 , it is evident that clinical variation or system gaps have been explored using patient journey mapping. In the first two examples, populations known to have health vulnerabilities were explored—in Example 1, this related to comorbid substance use and physical illness, 13 and in Example 2, this related to geographical location. 13 Broader systems and societal gaps were explored in Examples 4 and 5, respectively, 15 , 16 and in Example 3, a new technologically driven solution for an existing model of care was tested for its ability to improve patient outcomes relating to hypertension. 14

Consultation, engagement, and partnership

Ideally, consultation with heathcare providers and/or patients would occur when the problem or gap in practice or research is being defined. This is a key principle of co-designed research. 17 Numerous existing frameworks for supporting patient involvement in research have been designed and were recently documented and explored in a systematic review by Greenhalgh et al . 18 While none of the five example studies included this step in the initial phase of the project, it is increasingly being undertaken in patient partnership projects internationally (e.g. in renal care). 17 If not in the project conceptualization phase, consultation may occur during the data collection or analysis phase, as demonstrated in Example 3, where a care pathway was co-created with participants. 14 We refer readers to Greenhalgh’s systematic review as a starting point for considering suitable frameworks for engaging participants in consultation, partnership, and co-design of patient journey mapping projects. 18

Design the research question/project aim

Conducting patient journey mapping research requires a thoughtful and systematic approach to adequately capture the complexity of the healthcare experience. First, the research objectives and questions should be clearly defined. Aspects of the patient journey that will be explored need to be identified. Then, a robust approach must be developed, taking into account whether qualitative, quantitative, or mixed methods are more appropriate for the objectives of the study.

For example, in the cardiac examples in Figure 1 , the broad aims included mapping existing pathways through health services where there were known problems 12 , 13 , 15 , 16 and documenting the co-creation of a new care pathway using quantitative, qualitative, or mixed methods. 14

In traditional studies, questions that might be addressed in the area of patient movement in health systems include data collected through the health systems databases, such as ‘What is the length of stay for x population’, or ‘What is the door to balloon time in this hospital?’ In contrast, patient mapping journey studies will approach asking questions about experiences that require data from patients and their family members, e.g. ‘What is the impact on you of your length of stay?’, ‘What was your experience in being assessed and undergoing treatment for your chest pain?’, ‘What was your experience supporting this patient during their cardiac admission and discharge?’

Select appropriate type of mapping

The methods chosen for mapping need to align with the identified purpose for mapping and the aim or question that was designed in Step 3. A range of research methods have been used in patient journey mapping projects involving various qualitative, quantitative, and mixed methods techniques and tools. 4 Some approaches use traditional forms of data collection, such as short-form and long-form patient interviews, focus groups, and direct patient observations. 18 , 19 Other approaches use patient journey mapping tools, designed and used with specific cultural groups, such as First Nations peoples using artwork, paintings, sand trays, and photovoice. 17 , 20 In the cardiovascular examples presented in Figure 1 , both qualitative and quantitative methods have been used, with interviews, patient record reviews, and observational techniques adopted to map patient journeys.

In a recent scoping review investigating patient journey mapping across all health care settings and specialities, six types of patient journey mapping were identified. 3 These included (i) mapping key experiences throughout a period of illness; (ii) mapping by location of health service; (iii) mapping by events that occurred throughout a period of illness; (iv) mapping roles, input, and experiences of key stakeholders throughout patient journeys; (v) mapping a journey from multiple perspectives; and (vi) mapping a timeline of events. 3 Combinations or variations of these may be used in cardiovascular settings in the future, depending on the research question, and the reasons mapping is being undertaken.

Recruit, collect data, and analyse data

The majority of health-focused patient journey mapping projects published to date have recruited <50 participants. 3 Projects with fewer participants tend to be qualitative in nature. In the cardiovascular examples provided in Figure 1 , participant numbers range from 7 14 to 260. 15 The 3 studies with <20 participants were qualitative, 12 , 14 , 16 and the 2 with 95 and 260 participants, respectively, were quantitative. 13 , 15 As seen in these and wider patient journey mapping examples, 3 participants may include patients, relatives, carers, healthcare professionals, or other stakeholders, as required, to meet the study objectives. These different participant perspectives may be analysed within each participant group and/or across the wider cohort to provide insights into experiences, and the contextual factors that shape these experiences.

The approach chosen for data collection and analysis will vary and depends on the research question. What differentiates data analysis in patient journey mapping studies from other qualitative or quantitative studies is the focus on describing, defining, or exploring the journey from a patient’s, rather than a health service, perspective. Dimensions that may, therefore, be highlighted in the analysis include timing of service access, duration of delays to service access, physical location of services relative to a patient’s home, comparison of care received vs. benchmarked care, placing focus on the patient perspective.

The mapping of individual patient journeys may take place during data collection with the use of mapping templates (tables, diagrams, and figures) and/or later in the analysis phase with the use of inductive or deductive analysis, mapping tables, or frameworks. These have been characterized and visually represented in a recent scoping review. 3 Representations of patient journeys can also be constructed through a secondary analysis of previously collected data. In these instances, qualitative data (i.e. interviews and focus group transcripts) have been re-analysed to understand whether a patient journey narrative can be extracted and reported. Undertaking these projects triggers a new research cycle involving the six steps outlined in the Central illustration . The difference in these instances is that the data are already collected for Step 5.

Report findings, disseminate findings, and take action on findings

A standardized, formal reporting guideline for patient journey mapping research does not currently exist. As argued in Davies et al ., 3 a dedicated reporting guide for patient journey mapping would be ill-advised, given the diversity of approaches and methods that have been adopted in this field. Our recommendation is for projects to be reported in accordance with formal guidelines that best align with the research methods that have been adopted. For example, COREQ may be used for patient journey mapping where qualitative methods have been used. 20 STROBE may be used for patient journey mapping where quantitative methods have been used. 21 Whichever methods have been adopted, reporting of projects should be transparent, rigorous, and contain enough detail to the extent that the principles of transparency, trustworthiness, and reproducibility are upheld. 3

Dissemination of research findings needs to include the research, healthcare, and broader communities. Dissemination methods may include academic publications, conference presentations, and communication with relevant stakeholders including healthcare professionals, policymakers, and patient advocacy groups. Based on the findings and identified insights, stakeholders can collaboratively design and implement interventions, programmes, or improvements in healthcare delivery that overcome the identified challenges directly and address and improve the overall patient experience. This cyclical process can hopefully produce research that not only informs but also leads to tangible improvements in healthcare practice and policy.

Patient journey mapping is typically a hands-on process, relying on surveys, interviews, and observational research. The technology that supports this research has, to date, included word processing software, and data analysis packages, such as NVivo, SPSS, and Stata. With the advent of more sophisticated technological tools, such as electronic health records, data analytics programmes, and patient tracking systems, healthcare providers and researchers can potentially use this technology to complement and enhance patient journey mapping research. 19 , 20 , 22 There are existing examples where technology has been harnessed in patient journey. Lee et al . used patient journey mapping to verify disease treatment data from the perspective of the patient, and then the authors developed a mobile prototype that organizes and visualizes personal health information according to the patient-centred journey map. They used a visualization approach for analysing medical information in personal health management and examined the medical information representation of seven mobile health apps that were used by patients and individuals. The apps provide easy access to patient health information; they primarily import data from the hospital database, without the need for patients to create their own medical records and information. 23

In another example, Wauben et al. 19 used radio frequency identification technology (a wireless system that is able to track a patient journey), as a component of their patient journey mapping project, to track surgical day care patients to increase patient flow, reduce wait times, and improve patient and staff satisfaction.

Patient journey mapping has emerged as a valuable research methodology in healthcare, providing a comprehensive and patient-centric approach to understanding the entire spectrum of a patient’s experience within the healthcare system. Future implications of this methodology are promising, particularly for transforming and redesigning healthcare delivery and improving patient outcomes. The impact may be most profound in the following key areas:

Personalized, patient-centred care : The methodology allows healthcare providers to gain deep insights into individual patient experiences. This information can be leveraged to deliver personalized, patient-centric care, based on the needs, values, and preferences of each patient, and aligned with guideline recommendations, healthcare professionals can tailor interventions and treatment plans to optimize patient and clinical outcomes.

Enhanced communication, collaboration, and co-design : Mapping patient interactions with health professionals and journeys within and across health services enables specific gaps in communication and collaboration to be highlighted and potentially informs responsive strategies for improvement. Ideally, these strategies would be co-designed with patients and health professionals, leading to improved care co-ordination and healthcare experience and outcomes.

Patient engagement and empowerment : When patients are invited to share their health journey experiences, and see visual or written representations of their journeys, they may come to understand their own health situation more deeply. Potentially, this may lead to increased health literacy, renewed adherence to treatment plans, and/or self-management of chronic conditions such as cardiovascular disease. Given these benefits, we recommend that patients be provided with the findings of research and quality improvement projects with which they are involved, to close the loop, and to ensure that the findings are appropriately disseminated.

Patient journey mapping is an emerging field of research. Methods used in patient journey mapping projects have varied quite significantly; however, there are common research processes that can be followed to produce high-quality, insightful, and valuable research outputs. Insights gained from patient journey mapping can facilitate the identification of areas for enhancement within healthcare systems and inform the design of patient-centric solutions that prioritize the quality of care and patient outcomes, and patient satisfaction. Using patient journey mapping research can enable healthcare providers to forge stronger patient–provider relationships and co-design improved health service quality, patient experiences, and outcomes.

None declared.

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Author notes

• cardiovascular system
• health personnel
• health services
• health care systems
• narrative discourse

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What is patient journey mapping

A patient journey mapping — also called user journey mapping in healthcare — is an exercise for medical startup owners and developers to create a visual trip of the patient across the solution and come up with a seamless patient journey.

The key idea is to construct a patient experience that encompasses all aspects of the patient’s interaction with the startup, its services, and the product. It includes what users think and feel about the platform.

To create a patient journey map , you need to come up with every step patients would take in the app to reach their goals

The goal of the process is to get more competent about how patients will interact with your platform, what they expect and think.

Here is an example of an average healthcare journey:

Key benefits of a patient journey map 

More than 79% of marketing leads don’t convert into sales and customers, according to the MarketingSherpa report. The main reason for it is a lack of information about the needs of the user based on who they are and where they are in the interaction. It means, even if your marketing strategy is eye-catching and effective, without knowledge about your user, the platform has little chance to be successful.

Creating a patient journey map can directly and significantly impact user experience on your healthcare platform. Here is the list of 5 benefits of patient journey mapping for web and mobile apps.

  Patient journey mapping:

• Creates personalized patient experiences;
• Lets you determine unmet user needs and identify pain points;
• Aligns your organization and stakeholders with a common view of the patient experience;
• Helps measure gaps between the intended experience for your patients versus the actual experience;
• Assists with breaking down and understanding complex journeys across multiple touchpoints.

4 types of patient journey maps

To purposefully design patient experience and create a healthcare journey, you will need to choose a type of map. The choice usually depends on the time and priorities you have, as well as the level of engagement of your stakeholders.

To get a better idea, check out these 4 examples of the most popular types of a patient journey map and 4 templated you can reuse for your startup:

Current state maps . The current state healthcare journey map is a “snapshot” of how things are today. It depicts how a patient interacts with a product and shows the weaknesses and strengths of the experience. It’s the most common and easy-to-create type of map, but not very strategic.

To fill in our template, you have to describe every step of the journey with customer’s thoughts, actions, touchpoints (when and how they come in contact with your solution), as well as proposed changes

Future state maps . Such maps present an ideal situation. It’s a “dream” version of a patient journey map that highlights innovation and bold ideas for improvement. Future state maps are built based on current state maps, but they are free of existing constraints and limitations. This type of map is important for strategic planning and UI/UX improvements.

To create a future state map, you need to come up with a dream scenario and patient expectations a customer would have. Break them down into awareness steps, pre-visit, experience, post-visit, and add the user’s actions for each

Day-in-the-life maps . Day-in-the-life maps show everything patients think, feel, and do during the day. This type is similar to current state maps, but there is a difference. Day-in-the-life journey is not limited by your product, it includes everything a user does inside and outside of a healthcare service.

To fill in the day-in-the-life map, imagine how the journey of your customer goes from the moment they wake up till the time they go to bed. Describe each step with details

Service blueprint maps . Those are not exactly the patient journey maps, but a visual layout of administrative systems and tools that are required to deliver a great user experience at every step. It breaks down what’s happening behind the scenes of patient flow and what resources are used to support a patient’s journey.

Service blueprint maps can include the company’s mission and vision, employees, technology, customer activity, internal and external factors, and backstage actions. Service Blueprint can help you not only understand who your patients are but also how you can operate better and grow the business internally.

To create a service blueprint, get the simple customer journey map and to each step add frontstage and backstage actions that happen to support the user’s journey

6 steps to create a patient journey map

Patient journey mapping requires a lot of knowledge about the patients. Without understanding your customers and their needs, finding gaps and growth opportunities can be very challenging.

To help you approach mapping the patient journey, we put together a 6-step guide to creating an effective and useful map.

Step 1: Define goals and the scope of the map

First things first, you will need to identify the goal and the type of the map.

In the healthcare industry especially, positive patient experience is tied to transparency and clarity during the process. When users deal with health issues, the last thing they want is confusing navigation.

To build a path from A to B and make sure all stakeholders are on the same page, you will need to define end results, main objectives, and key points of patient journey mapping. See our list of questions to ask to get started with the process.

❓Questions to ask:

• What is the purpose of creating the map? What are the expected results from the process of patient journey mapping?
• What type of patient journey maps will we use?
• How will we know our end goal is achieved? What success looks like?

Step 2: Create patient personas and do user research

A patient persona — or a user persona — is a fictional character that represents a segment of users with similar needs and traits. It can be based on your current or ideal customers, depending on the type of map you choose to create.

Patient persona profiles should include demographic information (age, race, marital status, income), habits, goals, common pain points, and motivations. You can be as detailed as possible and add any patient data that is relevant to your healthcare solution: from needs and frustrations to coffee preferences and favorite brands.

• What are the types of users that will interact with your app?
• What are the reasons why patients will use this healthcare service?
• How often do they interact with healthcare providers? What are the pain points of this interaction?
• How is your startup helping them overcome their challenges?

Step 3: Map the patient’s touchpoints

Next, we recommend mapping every step of a patient’s journey, including the first interaction, pre visit services, treatment, and post visit. The touchpoints will include every interaction with your healthcare service. All this information will become the backbone of your healthcare experience.

To make the most out of patient journey maps, you can include information about the user’s emotional state at each touchpoint and ideas for potential changes. This way, when you return to the map in the future, you will reconstruct what users feel and think about the solution at each step.

• How does the first touch with our platform happen? What’s the new and first-time user experience like?
• What are the main stages of a customer’s journey?
• What pre visit and post visit services do we offer to a patient?

Step 4: Use automation tools

Once you define touchpoints and arrange them on the map, it’s time to make use of technology and come up with ways to automate patient care. It might seem too easy to do, but in a complex healthcare system, something can always slip away.

Your goal is to make sure all processes are automated and run as smoothly as possible. For example, add online appointment booking to help patients schedule a consultation in seconds. Or enable prescription refill reminders to help users stay on top of things and show that you care about them.

• What digital engagement tools exist on the market? Which of them can benefit this particular healthcare journey?
• Will patients be satisfied with each step? How can you make their experience better?

Step 5: Create a communication plan

Clear communication and education can prevent misunderstandings and possible confusion among patients. Their journey should be well-informed and effective at each and every stage. This step can be executed towards the final launch or can be ongoing during the rest of the development services.

Before creating a communication plan, you need to analyze your current communication efforts and identify what works and what doesn’t. Researching the competitors and the market also can help you find new communication tools that can be implemented for a better patient experience. For example, you can improve your patient messaging system, spice up the tone of voice on the platform, or sign up for EHR calling to create a smart office.

• How effective is our current communication system?
• What are the most recent communication technologies and innovative tools we can adopt?
• Do healthcare providers know about communication technologies we use/plan to use?

Step 6: Get patient feedback for future improvements

Last, but not least, is to gather patient feedback from those who have already interacted with your solution and received healthcare services. If all previous steps can be done before the launch, this stage requires real users.

You will need to ask the patients how they really feel about the solution and compare it with your expectations or predictions. Feedback can be received by a short post-visit survey or quick thumb-up/thumb-down buttons on the screens. You can store this information separately, or add it on the map, so you can make precise data-driven decisions about patient journey mapping in the future.

• Was it easy to schedule an appointment with the app? What was patients’ overall experience with the platform like?
• How easy or difficult for patients was to interact with an app and complete their journey?
• What was missing from the patient’s interaction with the app?

Wrapping up

Overall, patient journey mapping is an effective tool to meet your user’s needs, create a personalized patient experience, improve patient satisfaction, and identify the room for improvement. When you start working on the map for your solution, preparation is key to success. The better you know your customer, the more detailed and precise map you can create.

It’s very important to remember that you are not your own patient, and despite years of experience and expertise, you can still uncover surprising insights during the patient journey mapping.

Create insightful patient journey maps to better understand what your users experience and innovate your services accordingly

Eventually, patient journey maps will lead to a higher patient retention rate, elevated quality of patient care, and improved user satisfaction.

At Purrweb we provide mobile and web software development services with straightforward and cutting-edge UI/UX to level up the user experience. We help startups and existing companies build an MVP in 3 months and test a business idea with real-world customers.

What is patient journey mapping?

Patient journey mapping is a process of recreating steps patients would take in the healthcare app to reach their goals.

What is patient experience?

Patient experience encompasses all aspects of the patient's interaction with the startup, its services, and the product. To map the patient journey, you need to recreate every step patients would take in the app to reach their goal.

What are the benefits of patient journey mapping?

Creating a patient journey map can directly and significantly impact user experience on your platform. In particular, it can lead to personalized patient experience, identifying unmet user needs and common pain points, common view of the patient experience among all team members, locating gaps between the intended experience for your patients versus the actual experience, breaking down and understanding complex journeys across multiple touchpoints.

Why is the patient journey map important in healthcare?

How patient journey maps are created.

Step 1: Define goals and the scope of the map. Step 2: Create patient personas and do user research. Step 3: Map patient’s touchpoints. Step 4: Use automation tools. Step 5: Create a communication plan. Step 6: Get patient feedback for future improvements.

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Case Study Library

Where innovations are collected and shared to disseminate and replicate good ideas

The ‘Integrated Patient Journey Map’: A Design Tool for Embedding the Pillars of Quality in Healthcare Solutions

IPJM offers a constructive tool for multi-disciplinary teams to work together in designing healthcare solutions, through mapping the physical and emotional journey of patients for both the current service and the proposed service reform. It supports groups in understanding and negotiating the conflicting requirements that can arise during transformational projects. This is achieved using journey mapping and user personas for graphically externalising key domain knowledge.

Innovation Summary

Innovation overview.

Health information technology (HIT) and associated data analytics offer significant opportunities for tackling some of the more complex challenges currently facing the healthcare sector. However, in order to deliver robust healthcare service improvements, it is essential that the design of HIT solutions considers in parallel the three core pillars of healthcare quality - clinical effectiveness, patient safety, and patient experience. This requires multidisciplinary teams to design and evaluate interventions that both adhere to medical protocols but also achieve the tripartite goals of effectiveness, safety and experience.

In this case study, a tool that has been developed during a healthcare project called LEANBH using a human-centred design research approach is described. The ‘Integrated Patient Journey Map’ (IPJM) assists multidisciplinary teams in designing effective healthcare solutions to address the three core pillars of healthcare quality. IPJM is unique in addressing the shortcomings of existing methodologies by supporting multidisciplinary practitioners working together using a visual tool to design healthcare solutions that consider not one but all three of Patient Persona, Patient Journey and Medical Pathway. This helps to ensure that the designed services meet the demands of existing constraints, performance improvement, and patient experience. Findings suggest that IPJM supports groups in understanding and negotiating the conflicting requirements that can arise during transformational projects. This is achieved using journey mapping and user personas for graphically externalising key domain knowledge. IPJM also promotes creative thinking around service reform goals and fosters dialogue among stakeholders, potentially leading to better solutions overall.

The LEANBH project team used IPJM during successive workshops to superimpose the journeys of fictional personas of different expectant mothers who would use the connected health service. Eight fictional personas were identified by the team to represent the different hypertensive disorders that can occur during pregnancy and the medical scenarios which can occur. This included ‘Sheila’, a 31-year old first-time expectant mother at risk of hypertension during pregnancy due to a family history of pre-eclampsia. Her journey through the standard antenatal pathway was now complemented with her use of the proposed connected health solution. Other personas included ‘Denise’, a 25-year old expectant mother who developed pre-eclampsia, and ‘Fiona’ a 29-year old expectant mother who developed gestational hypertension.

IPJM challenged the siloed thinking of both the clinical and IT subgroups. Individuals would often speak out on behalf of one of the personas and assert how certain decisions would affect the physical and emotional journey of this expectant mother. One powerful example of this emerged during discussions around the journey of ‘Brenda’, an expectant mother who (due to white-coat syndrome) is incorrectly diagnosed with gestational hypertension and admitted to the hospital. The group discussed the emotional impact this event would have on Brenda and challenged itself to come up with ways in which the connected health platform could be designed to avoid the unnecessary hospitalisation of Brenda.

As stated by the project manager, these activities represented a significant milestone where: “technical concerns and clinician concerns were starting to be addressed as a unit as opposed to being two separate entities… For the first time people realised that the journey wasn’t a clinical journey, it wasn’t a medical journey, but neither was it a technological journey. It was all combined together”.

Innovation Description

What makes your project innovative.

In comparison with other mapping tools, IPJM offers the possibility to focus on the comparison between the ‘AS IS’ and ‘TO BE’ versions of the pathway under study – this is a significant advantage in projects that pursue specific improvement targets. Findings indicate that IPJM offered a constructive tool for multi-disciplinary teams to work together in designing healthcare solutions, through mapping the physical and emotional journey of patients for both the current service and the proposed connected health service. This allowed team members to consider the goals, tasks, constraints, and actors involved in the delivery of this journey, and to capture requirements for the digital touchpoints of the connected health service. Above all else it helped to negotiate differences of opinion among stakeholders.

What is the current status of your innovation?

The IPJM has since been applied to numerous other contexts including palliative care, dentistry, and more recently antenatal visits in the era of COVID-19. A number of papers have been published on the IPJM and associated collaboration process. These papers were accepted in peer-reviewed outlets in both the healthcare and information systems domains. The following list provides a sample of papers for further reading: • McCarthy, S., O'Raghallaigh, P., Woodworth, S., Lim, Y. Y., Kenny, L. C., & Adam, F. (2020). The 'Integrated Patient Journey Map': A Design Tool for Embedding the Pillars of Quality in Health Information Technology Solutions. Journal of Medical Internet Research. • McCarthy, S., O'Raghallaigh, P., Woodworth, S., Lim, Y. Y., Kenny, L. C., & Adam, F. (2016). An integrated patient journey mapping tool for embedding quality in healthcare service reform. Journal of Decision Systems, 25(sup1), 354-368.

Innovation Development

Collaborations & partnerships.

The LEANBH project was a collaborative effort involving organisations from academia, the healthcare sector, and industry. Project partners included INFANT research centre (University College Cork), IBM, and Laya Healthcare. The creators of the IPJM are now looking for further collaborators to apply the IPJM to new clinical contexts and adapt the design tool to meet the demanding challenges currently facing the healthcare sector.

Users, Stakeholders & Beneficiaries

The IPJM provides a canvas for interdisciplinary groups to explore improved medical pathways, technical considerations of HIT platforms, and the needs and capabilities of different stakeholders e.g. expectant mothers, clinicians, developers, nurses, midwives, and other healthcare practitioners.

Innovation Reflections

Results, outcomes & impacts.

The IPJM enabled the group to develop a common language around the antenatal pathway. It became a powerful means of building shared understanding. For example, the IS subgroup faced a steep learning curve to reach an understanding of the obstetrics domain and the various healthcare settings in which the connected health platform would be deployed. Similarly, clinicians had limited knowledge of the technology aspects of the connected health platform. The IPJM challenged siloed knowledge around the clinical and technology pathways and helped bridge disciplinary boundaries. The synergies arising from this confluence of disciplinary knowledge was essential for highlighting IT and clinical challenges, both previously known and unknown. As pointed out by the developer: “It was useful. It was only when I walked through the journey map explaining how the (smartphone) app would work that I realised that others had different interpretations”.

Challenges and Failures

It was difficult at times to secure participation from certain groupings in some meetings. For example, clinicians sometimes found it difficult to commit time to using IPJM as they felt they were too busy and that the journey maps were for the development team rather than for themselves. Resolving these misconceptions is essential to producing maps, which are accurate and robust in the face of real-life scenarios. IPJM also does not make explicit reference to Key Performance Indicators (KPI) such as throughput and waiting times, or other metrics such as productivity and cost efficiency, although these may be essential elements of the performance and success of the services being designed. While incorporating this element in the tool would be useful, there is also a risk that increasing the level of detail may compromise the overall accessibility and reliability of the maps.

Conditions for Success

Shared understanding is crucial to the success of projects involving stakeholders from different organisational and disciplinary backgrounds. In the absence of shared understanding, the perspectives and intentions of team members can become increasingly fragmented as individuals may not even be aware of the intricacies of the issues around which they disagree. The IPJM provides team members with the opportunity to challenge assumptions embedded in ‘pre-baked’ project proposals and contribute diverse knowledge around the design of IT solutions. This helps ensure that design efforts promote both a shared understanding of users’ diverse needs and capabilities, and a commitment to the delivery of solutions that cater to these needs.

Replication

IPJM has been used by the Victoria Integrated Nephrology Working Group Project as a collaborative quality improvement approach to Patient Centered Care. The project engaged front-line staff and patients along with decision makers as partners in implementing practice changes to improve care. The IPJM contributed to the team being awarded a Celebration of Excellence (COE) Award in the Spring of 2018. The approach allowed them to engage “front-line staff and patients along with decision makers as partners. This structure has allowed the implementation of practice changes to improve care”. This promoted strong and respectful multi-disciplinary participation, relationship building, and provided a model for other interdisciplinary teams embarking on collaborative projects. IPJM is also recognised by the US FDA as an exemplar in how to take the patient experience into account when designing effective treatments. It is referenced in several of its guidance documents.

Lessons Learned

IPJM can be used as a cornerstone for modelling healthcare service reform where stakeholders collaborate to derive an understanding of and commitment to requirements. Benefits of IPJM identified in the LEANBH project include. • Embeds pillars of quality - Considers clinical effectiveness, patient safety, and patient experience in tandem; • Externalises knowledge - Allows stakeholders to externalise their domain knowledge and build a shared understanding; • Stimulates creativity - Facilitates dialogue between different stakeholders around developing creative solutions; • Accessible - Easy for multi-disciplinary stakeholders to understand, use and modify; • Adaptable - Can be adapted to the requirements of different contexts and specialities; • Emancipatory - Facilitates the alteration of medical pathways and the development of solutions for addressing their shortcomings; • Educational - Acts as a platform for communicating proposed changes, and their impacts.

Anything Else?

Anyone interested in learning more about the IPJM or discussing future novel applications of the tool are welcome to get in touch. The programme offers consultation services on use of the IPJM, and is also actively looking for collaborators to develop the IPJM further in new contexts. If interested, please contact:

Dr. Stephen McCarthy, Lecturer, Cork University Business School, UCC Email: [email protected]

Dr. Paidi O’Reilly, Adjunct Professor, Cork University Business School, UCC Email: [email protected]

This work has emanated from research conducted with the financial support of Science Foundation Ireland (SFI) under Grant Number SFI/12/RC/2272.

Supporting Videos

https://www.infantcentre.ie/research/research-studies/completed-studies/leanbh

• Identifying or Discovering Problems or Opportunities - learning where and how an innovative response is needed
• Generating Ideas or Designing Solutions - finding and filtering ideas to respond to the problem or opportunity
• Developing Proposals - turning ideas into business cases that can be assessed and acted on
• Implementation - making the innovation happen

Innovation Tags:

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Date Published:

18 March 2021

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Patient Journey PowerPoint Templates

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Patient Journey PowerPoint Templates for Presentations:

The Patient Journey PowerPoint templates go beyond traditional static slides to make your professional presentations stand out. Given the sleek design and customized features, they can be used as PowerPoint as well as Google Slides templates . Inculcated with visually appealing unique and creative designs, the templates will double your presentation value in front of your audience. You can browse through a vast library of Patient Journey Google Slides templates, PowerPoint themes and backgrounds to stand out in your next presentation.

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What is a patient journey powerpoint template.

A Patient Journey PowerPoint template is a ready-made presentation template that provides a structured framework for creating professional Patient Journey presentations. The Patient Journey PPT presentation template includes design elements, layouts, and fonts that you can customize to fit your content and brand.

How To Choose The Best Patient Journey Presentation Templates?

Keep the following points in mind while choosing a Patient Journey Presentation template for PowerPoint (PPT) or Google Slides:

• Understand your presentation goals and objectives.
• Make sure the Patient Journey template aligns with your visual needs and appeal.
• Ensure the template is versatile enough to adapt to various types of content.
• Ensure the template is easily customizable.

Are Patient Journey PowerPoint Templates Compatible with Google Slides?

Yes, all our Patient Journey presentation templates are compatible and can be used as Patient Journey Google Slides templates.

What Are the Advantages of Patient Journey Presentation Templates?

Patient Journey PPT presentation templates can be beneficial because they:

• Add multiple visual and aesthetic layers to your slides.
• Ensure that complex information, insights and data is presented in a simplistic way.
• Enhance the overall visual appeal of the content.
• Save you a lot of time as you don’t have to start editing from scratch.
• Improve the professional outlook of your presentation.

Can I Edit The Elements In Patient Journey PowerPoint Templates?

Yes, our Patient Journey PowerPoint and Google Slides templates are fully editable. You can easily modify the individual elements including icons, fonts, colors, etc. while making your presentations using professional PowerPoint templates .

How to Download Patient Journey PowerPoint Templates for presentations?

To download Patient Journey presentation templates, you can follow these steps:

• Select the resolution (16*9 or 4*3).
• Select the format you want to download the Patient Journey template in (Google Slides or PowerPoint).
• Make the payment (SlideUpLift has a collection of paid as well as free Patient Journey PowerPoint templates).
• You can download the file or open it in Google Slides.

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Download journey mapping templates for PowerPoint and Google Slides. Our 100% editable journey mapping slides and templates for presentations can help to prepare awesome presentations visualizing a customer journey.

A journey slide can be used to represent a variety of journey concepts, for example, to visualize the flow of the user in a new SaaS platform, or as part of a brick and mortar retail company. With the help of a customer journey map , marketers and analysts can present journey diagrams with awesome styles.

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Journey map slides can also be used to prepare presentations on customer segmentation and behavioral marketing.

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Patient Journey PPT Presentation And Google Slides Template

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