What is a Patient Journey?

Patient journey mapping is data collection and analysis of a patient’s healthcare journey and the experience during that journey.

Patient journey mapping assesses care before, during, and after any appointment or treatment.

Before Care

Before care refers to the activities before an appointment or treatment. This is the inquiry stage where a patient seeks to book an appointment for advice from a GP, specialist, or other resources such as the internet. It also includes booking appointments or scheduling care visits.

During Care

This refers to the actual care provision, whether in hospital, at a doctor’s surgery, or in another care setting. Patient journey mapping starts here when the patient checks in.

After Care

This is the stage of leaving a care setting to continue a course of medication or other guidance provided by clinicians for recovery.

Healthcare organisations are now implementing patient journey mapping for a better understanding of the patient experience. This ties in with patient engagement because of the data that is needed to understand and map the patient journey.

Not all experiences are the same, so healthcare providers need as much information as possible to provide bespoke care to the individual.

It also benefits patient retention. By demonstrating a more personal take on the care process, and a more personalised treatment plan, patients will feel there is more focus on them and a more dedicated commitment to improving their wellbeing.

This helps foster a relationship and build trust and confidence, which in turn leads to client loyalty. This is not quite as important in the public health sector but is massively important for private healthcare providers.

Patient engagement is where healthcare providers actively engage with people to tailor their approach to care, with the goal of improving the individual’s experience and the outcome of their care.

Healthcare organisations are now implementing a patient engagement strategy or a patient inclusion strategy as part of their patient journey management. By building a relationship with the patient, care providers can improve awareness of and access to services, but also there’s greater education for the patient to understand things like diagnosis and treatment to help reassure them or comfort them about the plan of action.

This patient engagement journey is about healthcare providing the right information at the right time. It is about accommodating the preferences of people young and old alike, and not leaving anyone behind as digital care provision becomes more prevalent.

Understanding a person’s circumstances (access to transport, mental health issues like social anxiety) are important additional pieces of information that make a notable difference to the patient for very little effort from the healthcare organisation.

All of this is important because patient journey mapping needs this data. Every person’s journey is slightly different, so the more information to hand, the more accurate and relevant the mapping is to the patient’s care but overall care to all involved.

You can learn more about how to measure patient engagement and how to increase patient engagement from our articles.

It is not the patient journey itself that is improving care, but the understanding of the patient journey. By knowing what the patient is experiencing, healthcare professionals and other managers can note the good and the bad and strategise how to make the changes needed to improve care and shorten the time spent receiving it in a hospital setting.

Improvement comes from providing a more targeted or tailored experience to the patient, but this isn’t over-dedication; in many cases this level of focused care is actually more cost effective by reducing the time to diagnosis and treatment, which in turn shortens a hospital stay.

As mentioned earlier in this article, a lot of the improvement comes from communication. Doctors, nurses, and other clinical staff need to be talking to their patients. They need to understand a problem properly and empathise with the experience. Everyone has a different handle on ill health. Some people are minorly inconvenienced, others get angry.

Some people feel defeated because they already have existing physical or mental health issues. Engagement is the key to understanding and tailoring care. From this will come improved results. By giving the patient the opportunity to speak about their thoughts, or to record them in some other way at the time, their feedback is fresh and pertinent.

This will highlight where any problems are in the patient journey. It might be with the clinical staff themselves, lacking bedside manner or using too much medical jargon. It might be on the admissions process, with patients feeling uncertain and uncomfortable. Regardless, it is only by listening to the patients and building up this picture of their experience that an organisation can improve.

An added benefit of doing this is that patient flow management can also utilise the findings as part of its coordination attempts. A better understanding of patient journeys improves the flow of patients through the hospital setting, and the quicker they pass through departments or wards, the quicker they can be discharged to recover in the comfort of familiar surroundings – something proven to reduce stress and reduce the chance of catching new illnesses, leading to an overall improvement in recovery.

The patient journey is important in healthcare because of the improved care results it can achieve. Clinicians talking to patients is vital for them to develop empathy and a full understanding of a person’s circumstances and their care experience.

Engaging with people to tailor the care provided improves patient satisfaction, and in turn patient retention. If a person feels valued then they’ll want to come back in future when they need help. Continued quality care and attention builds loyalty, which is especially important for private healthcare organisations.

This patient engagement provides more data to help better diagnose and treat a patient, improving care results, but it also speeds up care by skipping any steps in testing or treatment that have been previously proven ineffective or even detrimental. This is a cost benefit because there’s less wastage, and also quicker treatment generally has a faster recovery time meaning less cost for ongoing care provision in terms of healthcare professional time or medicines.

The big change is going from reactive care to proactive care. To engage with a patient is to take the initiative. The healthcare organisation isn’t waiting for the patient and waiting to just diagnose them and send them on their way with a treatment. They are helping care in a way that minimises the time spent unwell, that communicates the importance of medicine or lifestyle changes, and strives to keep a person healthy for as long as possible.