Using Journey Mapping to Design an Excellent Patient Experience
In an increasingly consumer driven world, healthcare needs to consider ways in which it can move away from its inside-out mindset, where an it creates a service then expects individuals to use it; and move to an outside-in perspective where it prioritizes the customer’s needs prior to building out services or products.
This is concept is incredibly important especially as healthcare continues its transition away from fee-for-service and toward value-based care, where the industry will need to find ways to address an individual’s entire care continuum and not just what happens while they are inside the four walls of a clinic or hospital.
A traditional inside-out approach to build in-office and on-site care is the construction of a value stream map. While this is an excellent tool to improve existing internal processes, they often fall short of addressing customer needs and their associated emotions on their health journey. To understand this, let us consider the below process of finding an appointment with a new physician. Let’s imagine a fictitious patient, Josh, who is feeling unwell and would like to schedule an appointment with a new physician.
While we can see the big picture process and the steps the organization needs to take to deliver care, is it clear who the customer is? What their needs and desires are and where we are falling short of meeting them? This is where journey mapping can come into play.
What is a Journey Map?
In its most basic function, a journey map is a visualization and storytelling tool used to understand and address a customer’s needs as they interact with an organization, and according to the user research and consulting firm, Nielsen Norman Group (NN/G), can be broken down into a few categories:
1. The customer, a scenario, and the customer’s goals (The Lens)
2. The customer’s experience, including phases of their journey and associated actions, thoughts, and emotions at each phase (The Experience)
3. Insights and Opportunities, including what needs to be done and who in an organization should be responsible for them (The Insights)
Here is a high-level representation of a journey map:
While this may look like a value stream map used in conventional process improvement activity, journey maps have a few distinct differences:
1. They are told through the specific eyes of the user, usually in the form of a user persona where a persona may include demographics of an individual including their name, age, career, family status, as well as personal and professional goals. There may be multiple personas to represent a unique service.
2. They describe the unique needs and desires someone is feeling at each step in their journey. For example, being uncertain (feeling) what to do when feeling ill so they do research (action) via Google prior to making an appointment.
Revisiting the story above, let us consider it from the lens of a customer journey.
As you can see, while there are similarities with the value stream process mapped out initially, when we walk through the entire process from the customer’s shoes, we can identify that there are opportunities, or jobs to be done for the patient that we may be missing as an organization, as well as needs and emotions the customer is feeling that may not otherwise have been addressed in a value stream map.
Once you have these identified, then it can be an opportunity to develop your internal processes even more via use of value streams to ensure your work aligns with customer needs.
Okay you got me; how do I build out a journey map?
According to NN/G, journey maps should have the following:
1. A unique point of view. While you should not try to map out the needs of every single customer, you should have several viewpoints, or personas. For example, in the case of orthopedic care you may have a viewpoint of a 25-year-old athlete, a mid-30’s manufacturer, and a 60 some year-old grandfather. While each of these individuals may look to seek care from you, they may have different underlying needs and goals.
2. Scenario. This should generally reflect a customer’s story and a unique situation where they have unmet needs that your organization can address.
3. Actions, mindsets, and emotions. The entire point is to understand a customer’s journey, and this information can and should be collected via interviews, market research, surveys, etc.
4. Touch points and channels. These are all the points that an individual interacts with, or could interact, with an organization.
5. Insights and Ownership. This is where your opportunities are within an organization to design digital touch points, or services to address each of the needs of your customers. These opportunities should then be assigned owners to close the gaps.
How can I successfully build a journey map?
1. Collect your data and research up front. While it can be tempting to get multiple groups into a room, customer and user data needs to be collected prior to bringing in multiple stakeholders and beginning your journey map.
2. Include internal and external stakeholders. Journey mapping should be an inclusive activity where you involve many stakeholders who will be responsible for delivering or supporting that care. Involving others helps build engagement in this process.
3. Manage scope appropriately. Scope could be as broad as an episode of care; from the point someone needs surgery until post-surgical recovery. Or as narrow as an individual’s interaction with a web-based portal.
4. Iterate. Journey maps should be iterated upon as your organization refines its products and services it delivers. They should not be a nice visual put together for use in a slide deck somewhere.
Ending
Journey mapping is an outside-in approach to address the emotions and the jobs to be done for individuals who may be seeking your services and products. When done well, they present new opportunities for your organization to address that may not have been thought of before.
When was the last time you put yourself in a patient’s shoes and thought about everything, they need to get the care they need? Would you consider using these in your work?
Additional Resources:
Mapping Tools: https://www.lucidchart.com/pages/
