Understanding the patient experience provides the foundation for delivering patient-centric care. It’s crucial not only for healthcare professionals (HCPs) and doctors but also for everyone involved in the healthcare ecosystem, including pharmaceutical manufacturers, payers, and more.

Increasingly, biopharma companies are putting themselves into the shoes of various customers—including patients, caregivers, and providers—to understand the unique challenges they face and to develop support services that meet their needs.  

Patient journey mapping ranks among the most effective practices for visualizing and articulating this invaluable insight. By gathering a group of cross-functional leaders (e.g., medical affairs, market access, patient services, marketing, sales, and more), biopharma companies can begin to outline, step-by-step, the various barriers, misconceptions, emotions, challenges, and opportunities across different stages of the patient journey.

Charting the end-to-end patient journey—from disease state awareness and education through diagnosis, prescription, intake, starting therapy, and ongoing care—allows biopharma companies to map “happy paths” (i.e., ideal scenarios) and also possible friction points that can be remedied with wraparound support services.

Below, we define the process of  ‘patient journey mapping’ and detail how biopharma companies can use it to understand—and shape—smoother patient experiences to accelerate program success and optimal patient health outcomes.

What Is Patient Journey Mapping?

Patient journey mapping is a strategic exercise that charts and visually illustrates the end-to-end patient journey to find, start, and stay on therapy. The best approaches will think holistically, considering not only patients’ experiences but their caregivers/loved ones as well, and will break down each stage (e.g., intake, prior authorization, on therapy) into smaller steps to exhaustively map each interaction. This includes various touchpoints and engagements, from initial contact to post-treatment follow-up, including interactions with HCPs, care facilities, and related services.

This comprehensive approach provides insight into the overall treatment experience, giving biopharma companies the opportunity to design support programs and other resources to enable more personalized, seamless patient journeys. This, in turn, improves patient engagement, support, and overall health outcomes. 

The Importance of an End-to-End Approach

Mapping the different stages of the patient journey allows biopharma companies to:

• Improve access to essential treatments
• Ensure continuous patient engagement
• Support treatment adherence
• Deliver effective patient support programs

Evolving the treatment paradigm to improve patient care goes beyond diagnosis, prescription, and follow-ups; an overly clinical approach overlooks the moments between that humanize patients and characterize their journeys. 

A truly differentiated patient experience must transcend ‘typical’ offerings by paying attention to the complexities and nuances that impact care, including education, access, language barriers, omnichannel preferences, and more. 

This is where an end-to-end methodology comes in handy. It’s important to take a holistic approach that incorporates real-world feedback and insights from patient populations and advocacy groups. These insights into the real (versus perceived) patient experience help shape services and solutions that prevent patients from failing to start or discontinuing therapy, which is particularly crucial when dealing with rare and chronic conditions or specialty medicines, which are typically more complex to administer and manage.

Understanding the Key Stages of the Patient Journey

The patient journey encompasses various diverse steps and stakeholders across the healthcare ecosystem. Defining, and aligning on, these key stages help biopharma companies streamline their processes and access to treatment. 

When looked at from the highest order, the patient funnel can generally be broken into: 

• Awareness: Patients experiencing symptoms or identifying a need for treatment may seek further information and educational resources about possible disease states, support groups, treatment options, and more. This stage begins well before a treatment is approved by the FDA and made commercially available.
• Activation: For FDA approved treatments, activation refers to a qualified patient who has been prescribed a specific therapy. While this stage has to be broken into even smaller steps, it generally includes:
  • Completing intake forms
  • Sharing medical history
  • Discovering available support services
  • Planning for treatment
• Access: After completing the initial intake process, patients, caregivers, and patient support services and reimbursement professionals must collaborate to confirm insurance coverage, reimbursement, and any supplemental financial assistance options. 
• Initiation: In the case of specialty medicines, there’s often a clinical education component like injection training or a complex dosing/titration schedule to mitigate adverse side effects. This step is heavily impacted by patient’s unique experience with the process so far and depends on external factors like insurance providers’ decisions.
• Adherence: After patients begin active treatment, support services teams must continually monitor patients and foster a supportive environment that facilitates and empowers patients to continue their prescribed program or drug. This requires collaboration and cross-functional operations involving patients and other stakeholders. For some conditions, this stage can be life-long. This step also involves field access and reimbursement professionals who need to ensure timely and complete renewal of authorization requests and more.
• Post-treatment/retention: While this stage depends on the treatment duration, in some cases, this involves patients entering a phase of follow-up care to track outcomes or adjust treatment plans.

Of course, these steps vary based on the disease state and treatment details. They grow even more complex for patients with chronic and rare conditions who use specialty medicines that may have complex REMS programs or more significant side effects.

How Patient Journey Mapping Can Accelerate Success

On average, rare disease patients experience the following before receiving an accurate diagnosis that would enable them to pursue treatment:

• Four to five years of delays
• Three misdiagnoses
• Five doctor consultations

Additional barriers to access include geography, with 40% of respondents to one NORD survey stating they travel 60 miles or more to access treatment and 17% of respondents reporting that they already relocated or were considering doing so in order to access treatments.

With this in mind, mapping the patient journey provides valuable insights into the challenges and barriers facing patients and loved ones. With this foundation, biopharma companies can better shape and pursue wraparound support services to ensure qualified patients can start and stay on therapy. 

At the same time, defining, personalizing, and refining unique patient journeys involves complex coordination and vast amounts of data across internal and external stakeholders. Achieving this at scale requires a dedicated platform to build, automate, and measure unique patient journeys/workflows—providing even greater insights into what’s working and what’s not to drive continuous improvement.

Improved Patient Engagement and Identifying Gaps in Support

Mapping the journey helps identify communication and engagement gaps, which can impact patient starts and discontinuations. Building and automating these journeys in a central platform provides data-driven visibility into what’s working and not, enabling patient support programs to determine the ideal time, method, and or message to connect with customers.

Consider an ultra-rare pediatric disease, where biopharma companies interface with busy working caregivers. By first mapping the patient journey, including incorporating the critical voice of patient/customer, the organization can develop digital-first communication strategies or “on demand” support resources outside the traditional Monday through Friday 9-to-5 workday.

Enhanced Patient Outcomes

End-to-end visibility into patient journeys allows for proactive interventions to limit patient drop-off points and ensure treatment adherence. With connected data and teams, biopharma companies can have a one-stop solution to manage Payers, HUBs, SPs, HCPs and healthcare organizations across the entire treatment experience.

Together with patient journey analytics, mapping enables biopharma companies to tailor patient support programs on derived insights, enabling better program and patient outcomes.

Data-Driven Decision Making

Mapping, automating, and tracking patient journeys with a dedicated CRM allows biopharma companies to monitor metrics like:

• Patient starts
• Time-to-start
• Discontinuation
• Conversion/pull-through
• PA approval rate
• Patient satisfaction
• Content engagement

This enables teams to embrace more agile, data-driven operations. With data to inform which intake touchpoints drive the greatest engagement, for example, leadership can role those changes out team-wide to drive continuous improvement. 

In addition, by understanding the patient’s entire journey and the role various partners play in it, biopharma companies can optimize their resources to focus on high-impact areas like specific HCP or HCO account engagement, channel mix, or partner tactics. 

Best Practices for Effective Patient Journey Mapping

Biopharma companies that adopt the following best practices for patient journey mapping will set themselves up to achieve better outcomes for themselves and patients:

1. Define Clear Objectives: Setting clear objectives across key stakeholders is vital for guiding the patient journey mapping process to successful outcomes. Involving multiple stakeholders—patients, caregivers, advocacy groups, access and support professionals, and healthcare providers—is vital to enriching patient journeys. Each interacts with the process at varied touchpoints, offering diverse perspectives for effective mapping. Cross-functional collaboration among sales, medical, marketing, and patient support teams unifies efforts to improve the patient experience and align strategies.
2. Leverage Technology: Technology is integral to bringing patient journey mapping to life, enabling automated, omnichannel workflows and advanced analytics to drive ongoing optimization. Investing in a purpose-built CRM for life sciences—like Courier Health—can centralize patient data across disparate systems and teams, build and automate customized patient journeys, and surface actionable insights to guide internal teams.
3. Regularly Review and Update the Patient Journey: As patient needs, behaviors, technologies, and treatments evolve, patient journey maps must change, too. Biopharma companies should continuously refine and update maps to reflect the current realities of patient care. This helps to address new challenges and identify opportunities for improvement to enhance the patient experience. As Gregory Leighton, Vice President of Access Strategies and Patient Services at Ardelyx, frames it in the State of Patient-Centricity in Biopharma 2024: “It doesn’t matter if the journey is 10 steps and 10 experiences, look at each step and ask how different tools and services can be combined to ensure the best possible experience.”

Build and Execute Insightful Patient Journeys With Courier Health

Patient journey mapping allows organizations to visualize patients’ experiences from initial contact through follow-up care. The exercise identifies bottlenecks that impact patient engagement and treatment adherence and allows companies to identify opportunities to drive continuous improvement. This is particularly essential for patients with chronic conditions and rare illnesses, who face even more arduous and complex journeys. 

A patient-focused CRM software like Courier Health makes this possible, offering biopharma companies 360-degree visibility into patient journey data as well as powerful dashboards, recommended actions, and predictive analytics to surface issues before they escalate. 

Get in touch to learn more about the Courier Health difference, including how we work alongside clients to build, execute, and measure patient journeys for better outcomes.