How to Improve the Patient Journey to Deliver the Best Healthcare Service

There’s always a demand for better healthcare service today, and it evolves over time along with your patients.

So, as healthcare providers, it is imperative to take all the necessary steps to deliver a holistic and rewarding healthcare service that your patients will thank you for.

This is where an understanding of the patient journey comes in

By considering the entire journey of your patients, from booking appointments to follow-ups, you can improve your service delivery and make every hospital or clinic visit a streamlined experience for everyone.

But how do you improve the patient journey?

Let’s outline what you need to know about the patient journey and share some tips about how you can improve the process to deliver the best healthcare services.

Read on to learn more.

What is the patient journey?

The patient journey covers every part of the healthcare service delivery process – from booking an appointment to seeing the patient and the feedback that comes afterwards. Understanding and refining the full patient journey is crucial to ensuring that both your industry and organisational standards are met.

The best way to understand the patient journey is to put yourself in the shoes of your patients and ask yourself: is there room for improvement in the way healthcare services are delivered today?

For example, is the booking process seamless? Are there frustrating queues? Do you feel it’s easy to get confused?

So: are there areas for improvement in your current process?

If your answer is yes, you may have to rethink the design of your systems to improve your service delivery. To assess the patient journey, these are a list of factors that you need to account for:

• appointment booking
• tasks and workflow
• business process management
• patient notifications
• patient feedback
• reporting and analytics

By keeping all these in check, you can monitor the patient journey to help you make sure that you are delivering the service that each patient deserves.

Why is understanding the patient journey so important?

Understanding the patient journey offers so many benefits to your healthcare organisation:

For one, understanding the patient journey helps you keep up with the expectations and standards of healthcare today by having a more holistic approach to improving patient outcomes.

By proactively monitoring the patient journey, you can identify gaps and address them as soon as possible to make sure that all processes within the organisation are running smoothly. This will then reduce costs, lighten the workload and help you focus more on your patients’ needs.

Better processes are also beneficial to employees. With a clear view of the entire patient journey, your staff will know which tasks to focus on and how to best do them. This way, you can assign projects to the right people and reduce the risk of burnout and work-related stress among your employees.

Of course, better service delivery starts with understanding. So, the more you understand every stage of the patient journey, the better you can serve them and make sure that their interactions with your facility are worthwhile.

How can you improve the patient journey?

To improve the patient journey, there are simple steps that you can take to help support your staff, your patients and your organisation as a whole.

Here are some tips that you can follow:

A great starting point would be to map out how your patient journey starts and ends. Is your appointment booking system efficient? How long do people wait in your clinic? Are they satisfied when they leave? These are just some of the questions that can be answered by mapping out the entire process.

From there, you can identify the common pain points and gaps, and think about how you can improve those parts of the journey.

Every improvement is best done with the entire team involved. This way, you can gain insights from people who are part of the patient journey and design solutions around real-life experiences.

Never underestimate the power of feedback. This tells you how your patients feel about their journey. This patient feedback can guide you towards how to improve the journey most effectively for them, with them.

Automation is the way of the future for the patient journey. Today, there are several innovative ways to improve processes and your patients are expecting to see them in your facilities. This could be as simple as an online booking platform (via your website) or a full end-to-end queue management solution that you can use throughout the entire patient journey.

At NEXA, we can help you with this digital health technology.

Our priority is to help healthcare organisations deliver the best healthcare experiences by supporting the improvement of the patient journey. Through innovative patient management solutions, we can improve efficiencies, minimise the monotonous workload for your staff and empower them to spend more time connecting with and helping people – all making the patient journey better for your patients.

Are you looking to deliver the best healthcare service to your patients?

At NEXA, we understand the importance that your healthcare facility places on offering the best possible service and experience for every patient – every single day.

That’s why we’re here to help.

NEXA is an Australian company that delivers innovative digital solutions to empower healthcare providers, staff members and patients by taking advantage of digital technology. With NEXA, you can support and enable your team, deliver excellent service levels and thrive in today’s evolving landscape.

Do you want to experience the benefits that come with integrating NEXA’s virtual queue management solutions into your healthcare facility?

Talk to us today to find out how you can make your patient interactions matter.