Leveraging Patient Journey Mapping for a Leading Primary Health Care Services Provider

What You’ll Find in this Case Study:

• About the Client
• Area of Engagement
• Industry Overview
• Business Challenge
• Solution and the Business Impact
• Healthcare Patient Journey Mapping Solution Predictive Insights
• Here are a few digital trends that are bringing about disruptions in the healthcare industry

The client: A leading primary health care services provider

Area of engagement: Patient journey mapping

Industry Overview

Primary health care (PHC) or essential health care is based on socially acceptable and scientifically sound methods and technologies that make universal health care accessible to individuals across economies. In the healthcare industry, primary health care service providers offer personalized and holistic care for patients of all age groups. It includes treating acute conditions such as respiratory tract infections, managing chronic diseases, and implementing preventing measures such as targeted health screening. However, the main goal of primary health care service providers across economies is the attainment of better health services for all. The World Healthcare Organization (WHO) has identified five key elements to achieving this goal:

• Increasing the participation of stakeholders
• Integrating healthcare across sectors
• Organizing health care services around the needs and expectation of people
• Reducing exclusion and social disparities in health
• Pursuing collaborative models

Healthcare Patient Journey Business Challenge

The client, a well-known primary health care services provider, approached our team of experts to help them improve their administrative services. The client was looking at gaining detailed insights into the patients experience to reveal new opportunities for innovation. Additionally, the primary health care provider wanted to create and leverage the use of patient journey maps. The client also wanted to anticipate the future healthcare industry trends and develop strategies to maximize customer retention.

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Solution and the Business Impact

The patient journey mapping solution offered by the experts at Quantzig helped the primary health care services provider to map the journey of their patients to identify gaps that may hinder the relationship. Our solution also enabled them to maximize customer retention strategies by identifying potential customers. Moreover, this solution offered insights that helped their administrative departments to better engage and communicate with patients.

Healthcare Patient Journey Mapping Solution Predictive Insights

Understanding the way customers behave can be very valuable for primary health care service providers. In fact, firms in the healthcare industry are now focusing on extracting useful information from a customers journey to make better business decisions. Also, the inability of the administrative departments to communicate with patients results in huge losses for the primary health care firms. Using patient journey maps as a guide, primary health care service providers can implement processes that deliver timely and relevant data and fill gaps that cause leakage in the customers experience. Moreover, our solution also helps to improve pre-clinical and post-clinical engagement, as well as other health initiatives.

The Patient Journey vs. The Patient Experience:

• Comprehensiveness: The patient journey encompasses the entirety of a patient’s interactions with the healthcare system, from initial contact to post-treatment follow-up, while the patient experience refers to the qualitative aspects of these interactions. While the patient journey maps out the sequence of events and touchpoints, the patient experience delves into how patients perceive and feel about each of these interactions.
• Scope of Analysis: Patient journey analysis focuses on understanding the sequence of events, identifying pain points, and streamlining processes to enhance patient satisfaction and outcomes. Conversely, the patient experience involves capturing emotions, perceptions, and subjective interpretations, providing insights into areas for improvement in communication, empathy, and overall care delivery.
• Outcome Orientation: This tool often leads to tangible improvements in clinical service delivery, operational efficiency, and patient engagement strategies. In contrast, enhancing the patient experience involves intangible elements such as fostering trust, respect, and empathy, which contribute to overall patient satisfaction and loyalty.
• Interdisciplinary Approach: While patient journey mapping typically involves input from various stakeholders, including clinicians, administrators, and patients, enhancing the patient experience requires a concerted effort across all levels of healthcare delivery, including frontline staff training, organizational culture development, and continuous feedback mechanisms.

Several Stages of the Patient Journey:

• Pre-Encounter Phase: This stage encompasses the period before a patient seeks medical attention, including researching symptoms online, seeking referrals, and scheduling appointments through online scheduling tools or calling the medical facility.
• Encounter Phase: During this stage, patients engage directly with healthcare providers, undergoing clinical evaluations, receiving diagnoses, and discussing treatment options. Interactions with physicians, nurses, and other healthcare professionals shape the patient’s perception of care quality and satisfaction.
• Post-Encounter Phase: After receiving treatment, patients enter the post-transactional phase, which involves follow-up appointments, medication adherence, and monitoring of treatment outcomes. Patient satisfaction surveys and post-transactional interactions play a crucial role in gauging patient satisfaction and identifying areas for improvement.
• Long-Term Care Phase: For patients with chronic conditions or ongoing healthcare needs, the journey extends beyond individual encounters to encompass long-term care management, disease education, lifestyle modifications, and ongoing support from healthcare providers and community resources.
• Feedback and Iteration Phase: Throughout the patient journey, feedback loops and quality improvement efforts are essential for continuous refinement of care delivery processes, addressing patient needs, and adapting to changes in the healthcare landscape.

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Benefits of Patient Journey Mapping:

• Enhanced Patient-Centricity: This technique allows healthcare organizations to gain a holistic understanding of patients’ needs, preferences, and pain points, enabling the design of more patient-centric care pathways and services.
• Improved Operational Efficiency: By identifying inefficiencies, redundancies, and bottlenecks in the care journey, healthcare providers can streamline processes, reduce waiting times, and optimize resource allocation, ultimately enhancing patient satisfaction and reducing costs.
• Optimized Resource Allocation: Understanding the sequence of events and touchpoints in the patient journey enables healthcare organizations to allocate resources more effectively, ensuring that the right resources are available at the right time and place to meet patient needs.
• Data-Driven Decision-Making: This tool generates actionable insights based on real-world patient experiences, enabling data-driven decision-making, targeted interventions, and continuous quality improvement efforts across the healthcare system.

How Can Health Systems Prioritize Engagement in the Patient Journey?

Health systems can prioritize engagement in the patient journey by implementing patient-centric approaches that focus on personalized care, proactive communication, and meaningful interactions at every stage of the care continuum. This involves:

• Investing in Patient Relationship Management: Health systems can leverage healthcare CRM solutions to capture and analyze patient demographics, psychographics, and social information, allowing for personalized communication, tailored interventions, and proactive outreach based on individual needs and preferences.
• Utilizing Feedback Mechanisms: Establishing closed-loop systems for collecting patient feedback, whether through patient satisfaction surveys, post-encounter interviews, or online feedback platforms, enables health systems to identify areas for improvement, address patient concerns in real-time, and continuously enhance the patient experience.

How to Create a High-Quality Patient Engagement Journey?

Creating a high-quality patient engagement journey requires a multifaceted approach that integrates technology, communication strategies, and patient-centered care principles. Key strategies include:

• Empowering Patients Through Education: Providing patients with access to reliable health information, educational resources, and self-management tools empowers them to actively participate in their care, make informed decisions, and adhere to treatment plans, ultimately improving health outcomes and satisfaction.
• Promoting Seamless Communication: Implementing communication channels such as secure messaging platforms, telehealth services, and patient portals facilitates seamless communication between patients and healthcare providers, enabling timely access to care, appointment scheduling, medication refills, and remote monitoring.

By prioritizing patient engagement, health systems can foster trust, promote shared decision-making, and cultivate long-term relationships with patients, leading to improved outcomes, greater satisfaction, and enhanced loyalty.

Here are a few digital trends that are bringing about disruptions in the healthcare industry

• Smart technology and wearable devices: The emergence of smart technology in healthcare has brought about various innovations in wearable devices. Wearables use embedded smart sensors and can also store data that can be accessed when needed or transmit the results to the clinic in real-time. Moreover, such devices can also measure the temperature, perform ECGs, and DIY blood tests.
• The emergence of big data: Big data is bringing about significant disruptions in every sector, and the healthcare industry is no exception. Gathering and analyzing patient data helps primary health care service providers in measuring customer satisfaction rates. The collected data can also be pooled and studied to predict healthcare trends for the entire country.
• Empowered customers: Patient empowerment is an entirely new trend in healthcare. Its a new way to look at healthcare and one that holds promise for all of us with easy access to the digital landscape.

To succeed in this digital era, primary healthcare service providers must consider implementing strategies to serve the end-users based on their needs. This necessitates the need for creating and leveraging patient journey maps. This tool can be highly influential when it comes to measuring the success of healthcare organizations. It also enables them to reach higher profit margins by prioritizing customer experience. Moreover, by creating and implementing this tool, primary healthcare providers can improve health outcomes, customer satisfaction, and the organizations bottom line.