Improving the healthcare experience for customers requires a deeper understanding of the overwhelmingly complex nature of patient care. Thankfully, today’s Customer Journey Mapping (CJM) tools enable your organization to chart the course of its digital transformation and make high-impact investments in an effort to simplify and streamline the member experience.
Examining Touchpoints in Healthcare
Thinking strategically about your members’ experiences allows you to identify the physical and digital elements that add unnecessary friction and find ways to overcome these barriers to consumer engagement.
Patient experiences in hospital and other healthcare systems may be defined by the following two frameworks:
- Physical experience: let’s consider the appointment process. The steps include: finding the right location, getting to the facility, and navigating the clinic or hospital itself (interacting with healthcare teams and undergoing treatment also count).
- Digital experience: includes the use of patient-facing digital systems (e.g. the patient portal for medical records or online communication with healthcare providers through secured messaging).
Beyond just being aware of member experiences through these two lenses, you must develop a holistic view of the patient journey. CJM tools help you accomplish this.
Many organizations are already making the improvement of physical experiences a priority. But what you may not be doing enough of is applying CJM to digital experiences. Ironically, as more of the patient experience goes digital, this represents a far more valuable opportunity.
Rethinking Patient Engagement with Journey Mapping
CJM provides opportunities to deep-dive into your patients’ experience, allowing you to identify their pain points and address the challenges they might encounter. It’s not just about mapping data through a customer journey, it’s about mapping patient emotion, decision points, and organizational business drivers into these experiences. The resulting blend of physical and digital information facilitates new insight into how patients experience your organization.
What you discover through patient journey mapping can be transformative. How, for instance, does your parking situation impact your patients? Is your care responsive to patient fears, comfort, and financial concerns? Of course, every patient is unique, but using CJM tools and plotting out the experiences of patients can reveal where and how you could make meaningful improvements that would make a huge difference for patients.
Digital Transformation and Better Patient Experiences
As the digital ecosystem evolves even further, mobile applications and the integration of physical and digital spaces will continue to transform the manner in which patients experience healthcare and the subject will become an even more essential area of focus. As the business drivers for these patient experiences are defined, CJM tools can bring greater transparency into how business decisions in healthcare will, directly and indirectly, impact patients, but only the right journey-mapping strategy can generate the necessary clarity into the consumer experience. Thanks to CJM, your healthcare organization will be poised and ready to capitalize on digital transformation for the benefit of your patients and members.
If your organization is looking to improve the healthcare experience for employees, partners and patients, please check out our Healthcare Connected Experience Strategy Kickstart. In just three weeks, this Kickstart helps you develop the perfect Digital Solution to strengthen the patient-caregiver relationship and get you well on your way to providing a truly superior experience across all channels.
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