HEALTHCARE CASE STUDY – Damo Success Stories

How Damo Helped an Integrated Not-For-Profit Healthcare Delivery System Develop Four Enterprise Patient Journey Maps in Three Months

A large not-for-profit integrated healthcare delivery system on the East Coast focuses on innovation and creating exemplary healthcare experiences. Damo has been a long-time advisory partner and understands the health system’s strategic vision well. Damo Consultants knew the health system’s in-flight work towards improving their patient experience. As such, the health system engaged Damo in identifying the first set of journey maps that should be developed at an enterprise level and then prioritized and developed the first four maps. The entire process of creating these maps ensured there was complete stakeholder agreement for all four journey maps. The time to develop these journey maps was reduced to three months. Damo created unique deliverables that would be used as references to further the success of their programs.

A large not-for-profit integrated healthcare delivery system on the East Coast with more than 29,000 employees, 12 hospitals, and a health plan that is recognized nationally for clinical quality and safety is strategically focused on innovation and creating an extraordinary healthcare experience.

Overview of Engagement

The healthcare system’s dedication to personalized healthcare prompted a deeper look at their patients’ experiences within the organization. Two in-flight programs aimed to improve patient interactions, but their strategies lacked a unified, transparent vision at the enterprise level. Multiple projects in these programs’ roadmaps needed prioritization to value the organization. The executive leadership realized the need for enterprise-level journey maps to inform and align their simultaneous CRM and Signature Experience programs.

The healthcare system engaged Damo Consulting to prioritize and develop a set of four enterprise patient journey maps. The Damo team worked closely with senior executive stakeholders to prioritize and produce four detailed journey maps encompassing the beginning of a patient’s experience with the healthcare system.

Journey maps effectively provide a comprehensive evaluation of current-state and in-process interdepartmental work by gathering multilevel stakeholders, facilitating, and documenting brainstorming sessions, and designing detailed journey maps as a reference for program or project direction for all stakeholders.

The Goals

Damo aimed to identify, prioritize, and create high-value journey maps for the healthcare system’s stakeholders. They created high-level journey maps to use as effective communication tools and inform development opportunities. In conjunction with several in-flight transformative programs, the executive leadership desired to develop updated and detailed journey maps that would be highly actionable and improve the patient experience.

Approach

The engagement was divided into two phases, with executive approval after each.

Phase 1

Damo identified a complete set of candidate enterprise journey maps for patient access and care delivery based on the healthcare’s stakeholder interviews, research of peers and industry best practices, existing journey maps, existing patient experience initiatives, and the Damo Reference Model. The set comprised a chronological journey of experiences, from when a patient needs to see a healthcare provider to ongoing care, such as follow-up appointments.

Damo prioritized the first four journey maps based on the following criteria:

The presence of an existing journey map that could be supplemented with additional details.
A higher number of correlated patient experience initiatives to the patient journey, which signified simultaneous work in that area in other internal departments (aligning with organizational goals and objectives).
Correlation to the upstream phases of the patient’s journey, such as pre-visit and visit, to focus on patient acquisition.

Phase 2

Once the first set of high-priority journey maps were selected, Damo conducted working sessions with key stakeholders to collect the required inputs and data. Participating stakeholders were designated as Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) on the specific journey and were chosen from various organization levels and departments. These SMEs were knowledgeable about the current state of patients’ workflows and staff-patient interactions. A member of Damo facilitated the sessions to define each step of the four journeys and map out every detail of each step. These details included the user’s goals, actions and touchpoints, problems and pain points, ideas and opportunities, channels, and emotional experiences.

After the initial draft of each journey, the work was reviewed for feedback by key stakeholders, including executive leadership, to ensure consensus that the journey accurately represented the current state of the patient experience. From the feedback, the details of each journey were iterated with the designated SMEs. This cycle was repeated until there was complete stakeholder agreement on the contents of the journey maps.

Deliverables

Results

Damo delivered four enterprise journey maps in three months with the constructed prioritization matrix.

Damo recommended that the highest priority enterprise journey maps were:

Find a Provider
Schedule an Appointment
Register for a Visit
Check-in for a Visit

Understanding the health system’s strategic vision and in-flight work towards improving their patient experience helped Damo create unique deliverables that would be used as references to further the success of their programs. Since these journey maps were being used to inform projects that were underway, the deliverables were created as living, online documents that were easily accessible and modifiable.

The way to harness the full value of a journey map is to use it to propagate updates. Damo discovered many potential high-value changes, including policy, process, website, software, and feature updates.

The ideal subsequent activity in Damo’s methodology is to use the gathered information to create a user story map. These maps are created to capture ideas and opportunities for all possible features and updates, and then the next step is to prioritize them. The features are organized into epics and feed directly into a backlog of updates to be made. This process correlates with agile software development. User journey maps and user story maps facilitate efficient, patient-centric, and actionable requirement gathering.

By aligning the journey maps with existing initiatives, they became valuable tools that bolster the success of existing and new initiatives, fostering continuous improvement in the patient’s experience.

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These four enterprise journey maps were foundational and instrumental in communicating the current state of patient experience to a wide audience and informing the goals, opportunities, and value of the new clinical access center (CAC). Incorporating the health system’s strategic vision and ongoing efforts to enhance patient experiences was pivotal in shaping the final deliverables.

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