What is journey mapping?
Journey mapping is a visual engagement tool that provides a holistic view of an individual’s experience navigating health care. It captures barriers during the steps of the journey. It can help health-care providers improve service delivery by fostering empathy, identifying areas for improvement, and streamlining processes.
STEPS of journey mapping:
- Identify health concern
- Schedule/get to primary care appointment
- Speak to health-care provider
- Initiate treatment plan
- Maintain health
Mapping a person’s access to primary care looks like this:
Journey mapping helps to:
- Identify areas for improvement and create a more person-centered system
- Build empathy and compassion for individuals' experiences
- Break down silos, fostering a more coordinated health-care system
- Focus on pain points and areas of frustration to streamline processes
- Streamline processes, reduce wait times, and improve patient experience/care
How is the FLA OHT using journey mapping?
The FLA OHT is co-designing the Health Home model with community members and health-care providers with a goal to create a more inclusive and person-centered health-care system.
The purpose of the journey mapping studies was to capture the experience of a primary care visit to help inform how the community members' experience of primary care can be improved as the FLA OHT develops and implements the future Health Home model.
According to Dr. Anna Chavlovski, Primary Care Physician, Chair of the FLA OHT Health Home Support Structure and one of the researchers of the primary care access study, journey mapping is an essential tool in co-designing a more inclusive and person-centered health system.
Journey mapping studies: The tool is used to explore primary care access from the perspective of these three groups:
- Community members without a primary care provider (see results)
- Community members without a primary care provider (see results)
The experiences of primary care providers are also being studied. This will help to identify what opportunities for improvement overlap with the findings from the community member studies.