We recently discussed how journey maps can be leveraged across organizations to create a holistic, patient-centered experience (if you missed it, you can learn more about ‘Activating Journey Maps Across your Healthcare Organization’). But before you can activate journey maps, you must create them. The following these best practices for planning your next healthcare journey maps will help involve your greater organization from the start, helping you to enhance the patient experience at every corner of your brand.
Bringing this organizational focus into the planning and creation of journey maps will help you:
- ensure the greater organization is along for the ride and are ready to put the maps into action once they are completed
- can capture insights siloed in individual departments, particularly those with patient/consumer-facing roles
- provide ongoing cross-department validation, helping you to create a set of journeys that truly encompass the patient’s full experience with your organization
Here’s how to get started:
Pre-project: validate your persona segments across the organization
- Think closely about which personas will require a journey map. Reaching out to different departments to understand their key audiences is one way to begin to seed interest in the project and validate you have all key personas accounted for.
- Another option is to send a survey to key departments or senior leaders to bring awareness to the project and understand what key audiences they are interacting with every day, pain points they see, opportunities they’ve uncovered, and more. Patient and consumer-facing staff members have a wealth of information that can provide you with a big head start.
- No doubt you also have internal teams that could benefit from the development of their own journey maps. Mapping out the journey for your nursing, customer care, or even sales teams can help to uncover key synergies and moments of influence between the internal organization and external audiences.
During the project: start marketing your journey maps
Consider creating a small steering committee of cross-functional staff members to provide input and review draft versions of the maps. This helps other departments feel a sense of co-ownership of the project and may unearth additional insights on how they may use these maps post-project.
Keep your internal audiences updated on the progress of your journey map project. You might introduce them to each persona in advance in the project’s conclusion or tease some of the key insights that bubble up as the project progresses.
After the project: take your journey maps on a journey
Once your project is complete, you can start incorporating your journey maps into your organization’s efforts in a number of ways, including:
- Roadshow your journey maps to departments that can leverage their insights. Show them how the maps work, ways that they can be used, and how they can impact the overall patient experience by using the tools in their work.
- Work with your training and HR teams to develop training for patient-facing teams — particularly customer care and support staff members.
- How are new staff onboarded at your organization? Providing journey maps to new staff members or creating a short module to introduce them to the journeys can help ensure that everyone begins their new role with the patient journey in mind.
By keeping your greater organization in mind, and in the loop, as you create journey maps, you can help create that consistent experience that keeps patients at the heart of everything your healthcare brand does. Designing your maps for use beyond the marketing department helps ensure that everyone in your organization understands the whole patient journey and how they can use their role to enhance the patient experience.
Our Digital Health Strategy team helps healthcare organizations create memorable patient experiences that drive brand loyalty. Contact us today for more information.
