In pharma, your customers will most likely be healthcare professionals or ‘HCPs’ - from hospital doctors and surgeons, to nurses and pharmacists. To be a customer-centric business, you’ll need to have a good understanding of the HCP journey, but you’ll also need to take the patient journey into account, too.

The patient journey encompasses all of the touchpoints a patient encounters during their experience from diagnosis to treatment. The HCP journey is closely tied to this, and often looks at the same interactions or scenario, but from the perspective of a healthcare professional. These journeys will give you a more in-depth understanding of your customers’ day-to-day needs and pain points, and can therefore be used to inform the way you target customers and to improve overall satisfaction.

Before we move on, it’s worth mentioning that these journeys are distinct from something called the customer journey, which encompasses all of the interactions a customer has directly with your brand. We’ll come onto this in more detail later on, but for now, let’s turn our attention to the patient journey.

The patient journey is often plotted across four key stages. At the awareness stage, a patient first identifies a need they have, like symptoms they want to investigate. At the second stage - diagnosis - the patient usually seeks medical advice from an HCP and may well undergo blood tests, x-rays and other scans.

At the treatment stage, the patient is advised about the best course of action, like a specific type of medication. The final stage, follow-up, is where the patient reviews how well they feel their treatment has worked.

Mapping the different touchpoints at each stage in the patient journey will help you understand more about your customers’ needs and behaviors. So, what would this look like in practice? Imagine your customer is a travel nurse called Daniel, and Rosa is one of his patients - let’s take a look at what a typical patient journey might look like for Rosa.

Rosa is planning a trip to Kenya and knows that she’ll need to get vaccinated before she goes. At this point, she’s entered the awareness stage of the patient journey, and she goes online to research exactly which vaccines she’s likely to need, and finds a local travel clinic.

Moving onto the diagnosis stage of her journey, she then makes and attends an appointment at the clinic, and discusses her needs with the nurse. Daniel then recommends a combination of treatments, including the appropriate vaccines, preventative malaria medicine and insect repellent.

This means Rosa now moves onto the treatment stage of her journey, which involves two further trips to the clinic to receive the necessary vaccines, and a trip to the pharmacy to pick up a prescription for the other medications. At this point, Daniel also discusses how the malaria medicine should be administered and other preventative measures Rosa can take during her trip. At the follow-up stage, the travel clinic sends Rosa an automated text message reminding her to take the medicine, and she goes on to use it as prescribed. If she has any issues, symptoms or concerns during her trip, Rosa also has the option to contact the clinic for advice.

Mapping the different touchpoints in a patient journey, like the one we’ve just seen, is an important starting point when it comes to understanding different customer needs. By understanding patient behavior at each stage, you can also start to see how this will impact your customer, because patient needs will often reflect their needs too.

In this scenario, you might identify that your company has the potential to add value at many of the different touchpoints in Rosa’s journey, including her initial research into the necessary vaccines, her various visits to the travel clinic, and even her adherence to treatment during and after her trip. You know that Rosa’s needs at each touchpoint are likely to reflect Daniel’s in some way, and reveal how your brand can make his day-to-day role easier. But, to ensure you’re adding value as effectively as possible, you’ll need more information than this. This is where the HCP journey comes in, which we’ll be coming onto next…

Customer & Patient Journey Mapping