Patient Journey Mapping

Innovation begins with addressing needs in new ways or finding needs that have not received adequate attention. With patient innovations, we are dealing with issues that touch patients, families, and providers. Marketers and innovators often have an incomplete understanding of patients’ needs on both a functional level and emotional level. You can’t understand it, unless you’ve lived it.

Inherent in evolving solutions for patients is a deep understanding of how key decisions are made. Who makes decisions? And when? While we would like to believe that important healthcare decisions are made logically, empirically, or with the advice of learned intermediaries, we know that not to be the case. (Medication adherence – the decision to stick with a drug that has been prescribed – is almost made independent of the healthcare provider who prescribed the drug.) So, unless we have a clear idea of how healthcare and treatments are consumed and the decisions and emotions and factors that surround those choices, we can’t create well-tuned solutions.

That’s where the Patient Journey Map comes in. Patient Journey Maps are tools for innovators, marketers and decision makers. They are rich, visual representations that help innovators and marketers develop a deeper empathetic connection to the patient, and provide a dramatic illustration of the gaps that are being addressed. Patient Journey Maps can support solution investment and concept development.

There are hundreds of ways of creating and representing patient journeys. If you look at the patient journey maps on in a web search, many feature figures walking down pathways reminiscent of The Game of Life. Patients and caregivers need to cross streams and rivers. They encounter dangerous waterfalls, climb steep mountains or travel through rainstorms.

The Patient Experience Map borrows from the Customer Experience map, which has been a mainstay of market research for decades. But there are major differences between a journey for Customers (who, for example, might be buying a new BMW) and for Patients, who are facing a major health challenge. Patients deal with fear, loss, family impact and uncertain outcomes. We all know how to buy a BMW (even if we’ve never tried), but the patient who is dealing with a complex condition is often without guides or milestones. In short, Patient Journey Maps are critical tools to understand the intricacies of what patients go through as they travel through the healthcare environment.

The best Patient Journey Maps not only provide rich visual statements, but they connect to patient narratives pulled from the core patient research. Journeys are generalized, but the generalities need to be rooted in real people with authentic, evocative stories. Good journeys are layered – they provide an understanding of the functional, the decisional, and the emotional.

by HealthEd.