Write Your Own Ending: 5 Plot Points in Your Patients’ Journey Stories You Shouldn’t Ignore
// By Lisa D. Ellis //
Do you know exactly how people decide where to go for their medical care? Understanding the path that patients take to access care can help you determine where in the decision process you have the best opportunity to influence them to select your system.
Mapping the Decision Pathway
Stephen Moegling, chief growth officer of Franklin Street
Consider this: The journey to selecting a health care system is not unlike the way people decide to buy a car, book a vacation destination, or hire a plumber. In fact, the basic consumer journey model can be adapted to almost any industry, according to Stephen Moegling, chief growth officer at Franklin Street, a health care brand consultancy in Richmond, Virginia. Franklin Street’s focus is on helping organizations find innovative ways to incorporate patient-centered approaches into their business models. And one of the ways it accomplishes this goal is by helping groups determine how to use the consumer journey model to map the path people use to access health care services.
“We asked ourselves how we could improve on the consumer model for health care, since health care is complex in how people make decisions,” he says, adding that knowing how people decide when and where they will access health care can be crucial to identifying the places where your organization intersects with your patients’ experiences. This information can help marketers make the best use of existing resources to educate people about what you offer—hopefully before they even need medical care.
Five Stops on the Patient Journey
To help you see the potential that exists on the patient journey path and determine where your efforts will have the most impact, break the decision-making process into these five concrete steps, Moegling advises: