“Patient” Journey Mapping & Why it’s Important
Mapping out your customer journey is a key method for designing meaningful experiences for consumers. For some retailers, it’s a pretty straightforward process. In healthcare marketing, is there anything that’s straightforward really?
According to a blog post by Melissa Frascella on HealthCareStrategy.com, “from a marketer’s perspective, the power of Patient Journey Mapping lies in its ability to help understand and affect a person’s experience as a patient.”
You can think of it as “walking a mile in their shoes.”
Different Strokes for Different Folks
The patient journey starts in various places, depending on where in the healthcare system you stand – whether you’re looking at urgent cares, emergency rooms, specialty physicians, or even a combination of some or all. To keep things simple here, we’ll look only at urgent cares.
Essentially, your patient’s journey begins at the onset of an injury or illness. There are many factors that come into play when a patient is considering where to get urgent care – and there have never been as many options as there are today: telemedicine, brick and mortar urgent care clinic, express clinic, free-standing emergency room, and even their primary care physician. Some factors that they consider include: proximity, cost, convenience (i.e. prescriptions offered on-site), reputation, hours of operations, etc. Each of these varying in importance for each patient.
Defining ‘Your Patient’
Because the top of our “funnel” is so wide (because everyone needs health care), it’s important to clearly define who your target audience is (or what your patient persona is) before brainstorming your marketing plan.
Let’s imagine we’re a boutique urgent care, with all the convenience-factor bells and whistles. We offer the most common prescriptions onsite – saving patients a separate trip to the pharmacy oftentimes – and you can even make a reservation online before coming in to cut down on your wait time at the facility. The catch: our price point is much higher than average.
With urgent care, specifically, we know the level of quality of care doesn’t vary all too much. The treatment plan for the common illnesses and injuries treated at urgent care centers is, in fact, fairly straightforward.
To identify the best marketing channels and messaging for our target audience, we would build our patient persona for someone who is willing to pay above-average prices for added convenience. And once we get them in the door for the first time, our job is to make sure our urgent care is their first choice the next time they need care.
Keep Them Coming
While your patient’s journey may result in a referral to a specialty or primary care physician, a diagnostic center, or even an ER, it’s likely that your patient – or someone in their family – will need urgent care again. An important part of their journey is a return visit – and part of your job as a marketer is to ensure one.
Alas, the patient journey now looks a bit more like our retail customer journey once their first visit has taken place. Your marketing plan should include tactics for both new patient acquisitions AND return patients, tailored to the patient persona you have defined. Understanding the patient journey is key to building a solid strategy for your organization.