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The healthcare industry is shifting toward a patient-centric approach, transforming how pharma companies develop and market products. While healthcare decisions were once HCP-driven, today’s patients are more informed and involved. This demands a deeper understanding of patient experiences, preferences, and pain points.
Patient Journey Mapping (PJM) is a key tool for this. PJM visualizes a patient’s experience across all touchpoints in their healthcare patient journey—from symptom onset to long-term management. It helps marketers uncover critical moments, identify treatment barriers, and enhance support and engagement.
Pharma companies increasingly use PJM to optimize brand positioning, tailor patient-centric strategies, and improve health outcomes.
Patient Journey Mapping provides a comprehensive view of a patient's path from the initial onset of symptoms to diagnosis, treatment, adherence, and ongoing disease management. Each stage of the healthcare patient journey represents unique challenges, emotions, and decisions that patients face.
A well-executed patient journey map is built around three key components:
Modern healthcare patient journeys reflect the growing reliance on technology, including telehealth services, wearable devices, health apps, websites, and social media.
Combining these components into a unified map allows pharma marketers to understand the full patient experience, uncover gaps in care, and develop targeted interventions to improve patient outcomes.
Patient Journey Mapping is essential for improving patient outcomes and commercial success. Key benefits include:
Menarini, a global pharmaceutical company, successfully leveraged Patient Journey Mapping to enhance its chronic pain management portfolio. By mapping the healthcare patient journey, Menarini identified gaps in patient education and support, leading to improved adherence and satisfaction.
An effective Patient Journey Map (PJM) breaks down the patient experience into distinct stages, identifying critical touchpoints, pain points, and opportunities for intervention. Key stages include:
Patients first experience symptoms and begin seeking information online, through social networks, or from trusted HCPs.
Patients navigate consultations, diagnostic tests, and the eventual start of treatment. This phase is often characterized by uncertainty and emotional stress, particularly if diagnoses are delayed or miscommunicated. Patients may also struggle with insurance coverage or access issues.
Once treatment begins, patients may encounter challenges such as side effects, treatment complexity, or cost barriers. These issues can lead to non-adherence, discontinuation, or switching between therapies, which can undermine treatment success.
For chronic illnesses, patients require ongoing care, lifestyle adjustments, and continued medication adherence. Long-term success often hinges on sustained patient education, support programs, and consistent HCP engagement.
Key decision-makers and influencers shape patient choices at every stage. HCPs guide diagnosis, treatment, and care, while caregivers offer emotional and logistical support. Online communities provide peer support and shared experiences, often influencing treatment decisions.
Understanding these components allows pharma marketers to align their messaging and support services with patient needs at each stage, fostering better engagement and treatment adherence.
Real-World Data (RWD) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) have revolutionized Patient Journey Mapping, enabling pharma marketers to gain deeper, data-driven insights into patient behaviors and treatment pathways. RWD includes data from electronic health records (EHRs), claims data, wearables, health apps, and social media. AI-powered tools like predictive analytics and digital twins help identify pain points and gaps in care, enabling personalized interventions.
RWD enables the creation of “digital twins”—virtual patient profiles simulating real-world behaviors. AI analyzes these to predict adherence issues, discontinuation, or adverse events. Predictive analytics also aids in patient segmentation, allowing personalized interventions for specific subgroups.
EVERSANA leveraged RWD and AI to accelerate diagnosis for patients with a rare genetic disorder. By analyzing claims data and patient records, they identified patterns indicative of the condition. This approach increased target patient identification by 15x, reducing diagnostic delays and enabling faster access to appropriate therapies. RWD and AI thus empower pharma marketers to transition from reactive to proactive patient support, driving better outcomes and strengthening brand loyalty.
Patient Journey Mapping empowers pharma marketers to craft hyper-relevant, patient-centric strategies. Key approaches include:
For example, during diagnosis, patients often feel anxious and confused. Clear, empathetic information about their condition and treatments can ease concerns and build trust. During adherence, messaging should focus on managing side effects and encouraging persistence. Newristics' AiGILE Messaging service uses behavioral science and AI to create resonant, heuristic-based messages, improving effectiveness.
Patient Journey Mapping identifies what and where patients need information, enabling effective omnichannel engagement. Key approaches include:
Patient Journey Mapping insights help marketers develop resources that assist HCPs in guiding patients more effective, such as conversation guides, information on co-pay support, patient starter kits with helpful resources, and empower HCPs to address patient concerns and encourage long-term treatment adherence.
Patient Journey Mapping navigates the complexities of the patient experience, enabling targeted messaging, optimized omnichannel strategies, and HCP support. Newristics' KRISTL enhances this by using AI and ML to create a message performance scorecard, identifying gaps in marketing strategies and suggesting improvements. It delivers omnichannel assessments across any channel, ad hoc or recurring.
By putting the patient at the heart of marketing efforts, pharmaceutical companies can drive not only brand success but, most importantly, contribute to improved health outcomes and healthier lives.
While Patient Journey Mapping (PJM) offers significant benefits for pharma marketers, successful implementation requires navigating critical challenges:
Effective Patient Journey Mapping rely on diverse sources like EHRs and patient-reported outcomes, but inconsistencies and incomplete data can skew insights. Further, healthcare data is notoriously siloed across different providers, systems, and formats. Aggregating a truly holistic view of a single patient's journey across these fragmented sources is a significant technical and logistical undertaking that must be invested in.
The healthcare landscape is constantly evolving, driven by advancements in medical treatments, shifts in clinical guidelines, digital health technologies, evolving patient expectations, and even broader societal and policy changes. A Patient Journey Mapping can quickly become outdated if it is not actively maintained and updated, leading to marketing strategies based on obsolete assumptions about the patient experience. Establishing a process for continuous monitoring and building flexibility into the Patient Journey Mapping framework are key for staying current.
Patient journeys are diverse, influenced by demographics and disease factors. Patient Journey Mapping must avoid portraying a simplistic "average" journey. Prioritizing segmentation, using diverse data sources, and incorporating qualitative research are vital to capture the heterogeneity of patient experiences and create truly patient-centric strategies.
Overcoming these challenges allows pharma marketers to unlock the full potential of Patient Journey Mapping, enabling them to create patient-centric strategies that drive better health outcomes and strengthen brand loyalty.
The future of Patient Journey Mapping is being accelerated by technology, enabling more responsive and insightful patient engagement:
AI analyzes patient data in real-time, predicting behaviors and optimizing messaging. Tools like AiGILE and KRISTL provide actionable insights to improve adherence and satisfaction.
Future Patient Journey Mapping will update in real-time using wearable data, offering deeper insights into patient behavior and enabling timely interventions.
Patients will contribute directly to Patient Journey Mapping via interactive platforms, fostering transparency and creating more relevant, patient-centered journeys.
Patient Journey Mapping has become an indispensable tool for pharmaceutical marketers seeking to align their strategies with patient needs, enhance engagement, and improve treatment adherence. By visualizing the healthcare patient journey, Patient Journey Mapping enables pharma companies to identify gaps in care and craft interventions that support patients more effectively.
Pharma marketers ready to enhance their patient-centric strategies should begin by integrating Patient Journey Mapping into their commercial plans. Explore how Newristics’ can help optimize go-to-market communications for pharma brands through innovative market research, machine learing analytics, and consulting services. Contact us to learn more.
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Newristics
01 Feb 2024
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