Using patient experience to drive positive health reform
Patient experience is increasingly recognised as one of the three ‘pillars of quality in healthcare’, alongside clinical effectiveness and patient safety. While the health sector is heavily regulated, delivering a compliant service doesn’t necessarily translate to a good service experience for a health consumer. Patient journey mapping is a common strategy used by organisations to better understand and evaluate patient experience.
Patient journey mapping is a method of collating and visualising information that is derived from a person’s narrative experience over a period of time. Capturing the various people involved in an individual’s care across different places provides an overarching view of how a consumer moves through an often complex and fragmented system.
Patient journey mapping provides insights that are often missed in the typical stand-alone patient experience survey, such as what happens in between each ‘step’ of the consumer’s journey (i.e. each service), and how different services interface with each other (or don’t). This helps to capture insight into referral processes, patient follow-up, cross-organisational communication, sector collaboration, and most importantly the impact this has on the consumer, their family and carers.
Patient journey mapping is as much about identifying what is working well and can be built on or replicated, as it is about pointing out deficiencies and things that are going wrong.
In fact, while a lot of service improvement initiatives focus on the small number of cases that might go wrong, the real value of patient journey mapping can be in understanding the ‘typical’ patient’s journey.
Beacon Strategies has previously partnered with Council on the Ageing Queensland and Palliative Care Queensland to undertake a patient journey mapping process, to inform our Gold Coast PHN Palliative and Aged Care Commissioning Project.
The patient journeys were informed by qualitative data collected through a structured focus group on the Gold Coast represented by service providers, consumer and carers. Several patient’s journeys were layered on top of each other, with the data aggregated into common pathways for aged care and palliative care and graphically designed. Here is one example of those produced, Keng’s Journey:
We used the journeys as part of co-design workshops with local stakeholders to help prompt discussion about how the system is currently working and identify areas of improvement.
The process led to better understanding of the service issues relating to both palliative and aged care, which will help to support a more effective commissioning approach by Gold Coast PHN for the region.
Patient journey mapping is a valuable tool to support organisations in identifying service issues or gaps, as well as highlight the current strengths of the system.
We believe more organisations across the health and social services sectors could benefit from using patient journey mapping (or client journey mapping) to guide service planning and design activities that lead to more positive experiences for their patients or clients.