How to Build and Leverage Patient Journey Maps
Understanding why customers behave the way they do can be extremely valuable for organizations. Companies that focus on how and why customers make decisions and interact with businesses — also known as the customer’s journey — reap more than 50% greater return on marketing investment than those who do not.
Any industry can benefit from mapping the customer’s journey, and healthcare is no exception. Many healthcare organizations provide excellent clinical care but poor administrative experiences. A lot of potential customers never become patients, and a lot of current patients lose contact with healthcare organizations simply because administrative departments do not know how to engage or communicate with patients.
Using journey maps as a guide, healthcare marketers can implement programs and processes that deliver timely and relevant information and fill gaps that cause leakage in the customer’s experience. This practice can help improve pre- and postclinical engagement, as well as further population health initiatives.
Let’s look at the benefits of customer and patient journey mapping and how it can improve engagement and population health initiatives:
Improving Preclinical Customer Engagement
The key to customer and patient engagement is forming trusting, long-term relationships between the individual and the health system. These relationships are what keep customers and patients interested and proactively engaged with healthcare organizations. Ideally, these relationships last for an individual’s lifetime and lead to economic growth for the healthcare organization.
Journey mapping helps healthcare marketers identify gaps and leaks that may hinder this relationship-building during preclinical phases. Gaps are points during the customer’s journey where the customer is vulnerable to losing contact with a health system, such as a lack of appointment reminders and weak or no engagement outreach at critical times.
Once potential gaps in the customer experience are identified, timely and relevant outreach, such as sending additional resources or automating appointment reminders, becomes a simple “plug and play.” Marketers take into account communication preferences, behavior and service-line involvement when creating retention programs and placing customers within them.
Customer journey maps give healthcare marketers visibility into these gaps, especially when they are involved in long-term service lines. For example, in the orthopedics service line there can be extremely long periods of time in between points of contact and procedures. Losing customers between these touch points is expensive: Health systems spend $15,000 to $20,000 just to get a customer to the point of scheduling a procedure. This is, unfortunately, a common problem. Evariant found that, on average, healthcare organizations lose 20 to 30% of these types of customers before their procedures.
After healthcare marketers identify when and where to engage customers, a healthcare CRM should be used to build, launch, and manage acquisition- and retention-focused campaign programs. Using this tool, healthcare marketers can reach out in a targeted, personalized way that keeps customers engaged with the health system throughout the care continuum.
Improving Postclinical Engagement and Population Health Initiatives
Even after a patient is discharged from the hospital their care journey isn’t over. Patient journey maps should also include postclinical stages to encourage retention and reduce costs. Healthcare organizations spend much more acquiring a new lead than they do retaining an existing patient — five times as much, in fact.
Similar to the way marketing can support gaps identified in the map for the presurgical stages, programs should be designed and implemented to support gaps in the postclinical customer experience. Health systems need to maintain contact with previous patients to encourage healthy living and to remain top-of-mind in case the patient needs clinical care in the future.
Most post-clinical outreach is focused on ongoing health, including providing patients with information and suggestions to improve their long-term well-being. Since this outreach is personalized, it can be used to target population health groups and encourage them to be proactive in their own health. The result is improved health outcomes and lower readmission rates overall.
Population health is an initiative that focuses on long-term care management based on geographic region, community, ethnic group, disability and other factors. By using patient journey mapping to inform population health strategies, healthcare marketers can similarly help reduce readmission rates and improve health outcomes for these groups.
Customer and patient journey mapping can be highly influential to the success of healthcare organizations — not only does this exercise have an impact on population health, but it also helps healthcare organizations reach higher profit margins by prioritizing the customer experience. Statistics have shown that healthcare providers that emphasize the customer experience achieve greater revenue than providers that do not prioritize customer experience. By creating and implementing customer and patient journey mapping, healthcare marketers can improve health outcomes, customer satisfaction and the organization’s bottom line.
This article originally appeared on the Evariant blog.
About the Author | Gary Druckenmiller
Gary Druckenmiller, Jr. is vice president of customer success at Evariant. He functions as lead strategist, digital marketing thought leader and C-level executive sponsor for all of Evariant’s enterprise clients, primarily focused on advising health system leadership of opportunistic methods to improve their digital presence and interactive growth potential.
