Journey Analytics: Mapping the human experience
As we continue to explore the proliferation of technology across the healthcare ecosystem by covering technology concepts from A to Z we’ve come to J. In this series we’ll be exploring journey analytics and how its transforming our understanding and insights into modeling and delivering human-centered approaches to healthcare.
Journey analytics is a rapidly developing field of technology that has the potential to dramatically transform the healthcare ecosystem. By analyzing each touchpoint in a patient’s engagement journey, valuable insights can be uncovered and used to improve patient experiences. Journey analytics utilizes gap analysis, data mining, and other methods to assemble vast amounts of healthcare data and information that can be summarized into knowledge. Converting that knowledge into a deeper understanding of the patient journey can reveal actionable business intelligence. This knowledge can then be converted into customized key insights that optimize an organization’s processes and operations. Through this process of journey mapping, organizations have the power to transform their services and optimize outcomes for patients. In this installment of The Immersive Nurse, we will provide insight into the benefits of journey analytics and how it can be used to improve the patient experience, patient care, and health outcomes. We will explore key data points and how they are used in the journey mapping process, as well as why understanding the patient journey is important across the entire healthcare ecosystem, from medical technology design to clinician workflows. Finally, we will discuss how organizations can utilize journey analytics to reveal actionable business intelligence. After reading this post, you should have a better understanding of journey analytics and patient journey mapping and how it is being used to improve healthcare experiences and outcomes. So, let’s get started!
Patient journey analytics
Patient journey analytics is the process of analyzing all touchpoints within a patient’s engagement with a healthcare organization across multiple platforms (online or offline) to gain deeper insights into their carepathways. Every touchpoint along a patient’s journey provides unique value, and key quantitative and qualitative data from those encounters which can provide a very granular view of the patient experience. Through the process of journey mapping, organizations can assemble vast amounts of healthcare data into knowledge that can be used to develop customized key insights, optimize those experiences, and predict future behaviors.
Benefits of using journey analytics in healthcare
There are numerous benefits to using journey analytics in healthcare. Here are some of the key advantages:
- Improved patient experience and optimized care: By understanding a patient’s journey, healthcare organizations can gain deeper insights into their engagement, promote more precise understanding of drivers influencing treatment choice, and identify both challenges and opportunities to refine treatment options and messaging. This information is used to create actionable plans that strategically target the optimization of patient experiences and the provision of enhanced care.
- Optimized healthcare workflows and elimination of care gaps: Journey analytics helps organizations identify unnecessary steps, time delays, bottlenecks, and other anomalies in their current workflows, allowing them to streamline processes and to understand variances in testing, treatment, and the impact that variation has on treatment patterns and on achievement of treatment goals. It also helps eliminate blind spots in an organization’s care pathways, reducing costly mistakes or gaps in diagnosis or treatment.
- Ability to identify key insights and areas for optimization: Through the process of journey mapping, organizations can isolate key data points from each touchpoint of the patient journey and use this information to unlock actionable insights. Comparison across such things as utilization, health statistics, and cost can deliver a comprehensive demographic view of how, when, where and by whom patients are treated and the associated outcomes. These insights can be used to identify areas that need optimization, develop targeted strategies, and improve overall patient outcomes.
How does journey analytics work?
Journey analytics involves collecting and analyzing data points from each touchpoint of the patient’s journey to gain deeper understanding of their interactions with a health system over time. First, healthcare organizations must identify all relevant data sources of interest (e.g., medical records, insurance claims, demographic information) prior to or after a defined anchor event. Once all the data is collected, it must then be analyzed for trends or patterns that can provide insight into a patient’s experience with the organization. This analysis can be done manually or using industry-specific analytics software. Some notable software vendors include Quantzig, IQVIA, TIBCO Nimbus, Qualtrics XM Platform, Deloitte, and SAS Viya.
Journey mapping
Once the data is analyzed, it’s then converted into a journey map that visualizes the patient journey. This process helps organizations identify patient pain-points such as provider availability, wait times, communication, and care modalities as well as aide in the development strategies to improve them. For example, if certain steps of the patient journey are found to be inefficient or ineffective the organization can use this information to develop targeted strategies to address those deficiencies. The key to this step within the process is to remember that the patient journey is ever evolving, so organizations should continuously monitor their care pathways and adjust their strategies as needed.
Industry use cases
Vendors provide software tools, platforms, and or services that allow organizations to quickly analyze data points from patient touchpoints and create detailed journey maps. Some notable uses cases include:
- The University of Chicago Medicine (UCM), for example, leveraged patient journey analytics to identify areas for improvement in their care delivery and workflow optimization processes. With the help of TIBCO journey analytics capabilities that connected every data generating point within its ecosystem UCM was able to quickly gain insights into their clinical pathways and develop targeted strategies to improve their patient-centric operations and responses to urgent events like cardiac arrest.
- Facing major staffing shortages and employees who’d lost faith in its ability to act on feedback the National Health System (NHS) used Qualtrics solutions mines data from its employee engagement feedback forum to perform key driver analysis thereby identifying priority actions that improves staff experiences and have had a palpable net positive effect on patient surveys and experiences. The NHS was able to analyze pain points identified in employee surveys to target priority actions and to make improvements faster.
- California’s San Bernardino County Department of Behavioral Health (DBH) paired with SAS Viya to assemble disparate data sources together to help tell patient’s stories and inform how best to assist their mental and behavioral clients. Their data maps allowed analysts to identify where improved access was needed, drilled down care gaps, and helped “promote awareness, wellness, resilience and recovery” in their community.
By using journey analytics, healthcare organizations can gain a more comprehensive understanding of their patient’s journeys and develop actionable plans to improve engagement, workflow optimization, eliminate care gaps, and enhance messaging. With the right data and insights, healthcare organizations can improve the overall health of its ecosystem from processes and staff to marketing and patient outcomes.
Wrapping the journey up
Patient journey analytics is a powerful tool for healthcare organizations looking to gain insights into their patients’ experiences and optimize care pathways. By understanding each touchpoint of the patient’s journey, organizations can identify key areas for improvement and create targeted strategies to enhance organizational deficiencies. Through journey analytics healthcare organizations can gain in-depth insights into their patient’s journeys, clinical pathways, improve care access and delivery. Ultimately, journey analytics is an invaluable tool in achieving the triple aim of healthcare — improving patient experiences, raising the health of populations, and reducing the cost of care.
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