Understanding the Patient Journey: An Essential for More Effective Healthcare

We are living through a time of profound transformation in the way healthcare is designed and delivered. Therapeutic innovations follow one another, services are becoming more digital and organizational models are constantly being reconfigured.

However, parallel with this progress, a fundamental question remains: do we truly understand what patients experience, at every moment of their journey, including their journey through the healthcare system?

The essence of the patient journey goes far beyond diagnoses and treatments. It is made up of decisions, doubts, expectations and obstacles - many of which remain invisible to traditional metrics.

Understanding it is more than an exercise in empathy: it is an essential and strategic tool for improving results and guiding actions that are more aligned with the real needs of patients and the entire surrounding circuit.

Why talk about Patient Journey now?

In a context marked by the fragmentation of care, increasing pressure on resources and the complexity of clinical trajectories, it is essential to adopt a more integrated perspective on the health system.

Building the Patient Journey allows us to:

• Understand the patient in all dimensions of their life (360º assessment) - capturing a realistic and personal view of their experience and the experience of those around them;

  
  

• Characterize patients' real journeys, mapping the different moments of interaction with the health system, from the first signs of illness to post-treatment follow-up;

  
  

• Identify relevant variations between different socio-demographic contexts and/or organizational models (e.g. public vs. private care);

  
  

• Understand the times between the various stages of the journey;

  
  

• Identify points of inefficiency and discontinuity - processes where information can be lost, delays in access, duplication of tests, failures in coordination between primary, hospital and community care, etc;

  
  

• Analyze behavioral and decision-making determinants, including risk perceptions, demand patterns, health literacy deficits and factors that condition therapeutic adherence;

  
  

• Evaluate the adequacy of communication and interventions, cross-referencing real needs with the responses offered by the various stakeholders;

  
  

• To generate actionable knowledge for decision-making, guiding solutions that are more patient-centered and more effective from a clinical, economic and operational point of view.

But how do you build a Patient Journey in practice?

Building a Patient Journey requires methodologies that integrate conventional approaches such as interviews, focus groups and questionnaires, often combined with more differentiated methods - such as immersive sessions, ethnographic journeys, digital diaries or co-creation / design thinking workshops with patients and/or healthcare professionals.

Combining these approaches makes it possible to build an integrated view of the patient by identifying critical points and barriers at the various stages of the journey, signalling opportunities for improvement that translate into practical recommendations to optimize experiences and results.

Understanding to transform

Studying the Patient Journey is not just an analytical tool - it's a starting point for improving the way care is designed, delivered and communicated. It's about seeing the healthcare system in a more integrated, clearer and more strategic way.

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Francisca Caldeira - Business Insights Qualitative Executive @2Logical

At 2Logical, we help turn complexity into clarity and data into action, with the goal of supporting interventions that are more effective and more in line with lived realities.