Rethinking Customer Journeys for Healthcare: Introducing “Care Pathways”

The Problem with Customer Journeys (for CX)

Recently, we partnered with a medical device brand to tackle a thorny CX challenge, and as we dug in, we realized it’s a pattern that we’ve seen present itself to other brands we’ve worked with across the healthcare spectrum, too. 

The Pattern Goes Something Like This:

• Brand wants to build personas and journeys to improve their digital CX for HCPs.
• Agency creates 4-6 journeys for various HCPs who all represent a different part of the aggregate user base (e.g., one HCP evaluates devices, another HCP decides which to buy, another HCP actually uses it, and so on…)
• Each CX journey shows a neat, tidy path in a vacuum for a single audience segment.
• Brand goes to use journeys and realizes: Uh-oh.
• In that “uh-oh” moment is a realization of what makes journey mapping for CX different from journey mapping for marketing. It’s a recognition that, unlike a linear buying journey, CX journeys basically exist outside time and space. There are data feedback loops, repeat touchpoints, cross-audience interactions, and more that make it too messy to look at 4-6 siloed journeys all laid on top of one another. 

How Can This Be Solved?

Anticipating this need for a different approach, we decided to take a different direction and develop a new framework, one we call the “Care Pathway.”

Put simply, Care Pathways provide an overarching view of the interactions of many different stakeholders across a singular, aggregate journey. 

For this client, the throughline was a patient’s journey from diagnosis, to treatment selection and setup, to ongoing maintenance. 

Along the way, we plotted touchpoints, friction hot spots, and CX channels for various HCP audiences who all interact variably with our client’s sales and support teams to optimize care along the way.

Creating this centralized framework gave our client a single source of truth, illustrating not only external user activities but also internal team involvement, and even current workstreams—all revolving around the patient’s treatment timeline. 

How else does the Care Pathway help marketers?

This care pathway keeps marketing efforts patient-centered, aligns teams, and highlights where resources can have the greatest impact. The healthcare industry involves multiple stakeholders: patients, providers, caregivers, and technicians, but this care pathway follows the patient treatment timeline, organizing marketing activities around their experience regardless of audience, which ensures teams maintain a patient-focused perspective even when creating content for non-patient stakeholders. 

It also serves as a single source of truth, helping teams plan projects, identify gaps, overlaps, and opportunities, and coordinate work more effectively. 

Additionally, by mapping the ecosystem onto the patient timeline, it reveals friction points and areas where additional initiatives will have the greatest impact. This enables strategic decision-making and drives meaningful improvements in the patient experience.

A Core Shift

Don’t be mistaken, we’re not saying throw out the tried and true user journey map, we’re just urging you to know when to use which method. Care pathways zoom out to look at the big picture - the patient treatment timeline - and then layer on multiple user activities to reveal the full ecosystem at play in healthcare marketing. 

The pieces that build out this strategic framework come together to align teams, reveal where to improve or capitalize, and support continuous planning, rather than initial set up. This allows a core shift from more segmented visualization to a connected and truly patient-centric source of truth, turning that “uh-oh” moment into an “ah-ha” moment. 
 
Let's chat if you think a Care Pathway could be what your company needs.