Building An Integrated Patient Journey

Integrated patient journeys take into account both the clinical journey and online journey patients go through during their entire continuum of care. Your marketing team needs to ensure that engagement isn’t limited to just a single encounter, but rather how you can successfully drive engagement at every touchpoint the patient might have.

Below are some common patient journey features to get you thinking about what you should include in your next integrated patient journey model.

Key Features:

Content is most certainly king.
Audience segmentation into niche categories with individual personas identified.
Multiple touch points over various digital channels and in person encounters is a must (Office visits, Urgent care clinics, Specialists, Primary Care Physicians). It’s going to seem excessive, but you really need to drive the focus points of your campaign home in slightly different ways over and over.
Integrated consistent messaging no matter what stage your patients might be in. (Make sure your messaging includes vocabulary your patients use).
Each step of the patient’s journey is targeted and adapts to the various stages the patient travels through.

Primary benefits:

More patient-centric. (Allow them to take control of their journey)
Become more connected with patients and audiences.
Makes your brand more relevant.
More convenient and accessible.
More efficient form of communication.
Speeds up the journey.

Secondary benefits:

Allows you to correct misconception or misunderstanding (Self diagnosis with google or WebMD)
Gain valuable feedback from different audiences.
Measure the impact of your content/marketing.

Integrated Patient Journey

Strategy:

Identifying the persona taking the journey.
Keyword research around topics users search for.
Drafting content in the user’s language.
Involvement of consultants, specialists, HCP’s etc. (Visualize these interactions patients might have with providers).
Optimization and content structure to support SEO
Sub-pages, custom sub menus and internal linking (Relevant sub-pages of unique content, links to related content and custom sub menu found from related keyword research, things that the audience are also searching about. So rather than just talking about what the clients themselves offer, invest in talking around the subject)

How to segment and target your audience:

Start with whomever the most common individuals are to experience the issue your brand addresses.
Then break them up into Demographics; age, gender, lifestyle, behaviors.
Geo-targeted and location based
Qualitative or quantitative data
Device usage
Previous history via CRM

Challenges

You need both qualitative and quantitative data to begin.
Not every patient journey is the same. Some are incredibly complex.
Large upfront costs

Though there are many more aspects to developing a patient journey, these are meant to highlight the key areas marketers must identify to properly implement such a campaign. It’s on us to ensure patients have access to the information they need, many times before they even realize they need it.