Place of Digital touch in the Patient Journey

Every therapy has a dedicated Patient journey, it may be more complex in chronic therapies and very simple in Acute therapies. Patient journey is the log of the patient's experiences throughout the cycle of diagnosis till the completion of the treatment.

Patient journey starts from the symptom identification to diagnosis followed by treatment choices. Based on the suggestions by the doctor an appropriate treatment regimen is followed by understanding the disease progression. Patient journeys are different to different therapies, the one in the diagram is for an oncology patient.

There are multiple times a patient gets in touch with healthcare facilities during the course of treatment. How can we influence this journey with Digitalization? I think we are at a stage where the Hospitals, especially private hospitals have got this covered with excessive use of Digital products to manage patient records, consultation, appointments etc. Let's look at the perspective of a pharmaceutical company.

The mantra remains the same where we need to first identify a problem. The problem can be as simple as the Doctor is not able to give appropriate guidance due to patient overload or the patient pecks on the doctor a lot with doubts about the treatment. Now we have to look at the patient journey, hypothetically let's consider the case of a cancer treatment. For the above use case we can develop a digital product in the form of an Application, which helps the patient to keep track of his medications, post queries to the doctor, and report his symptoms on a daily or weekly basis. On the doctor's end he gets to track the progress of his patients and keep a proper track of his patients. The pharmaceutical marketing company can provide this as a service to the doctors with their branding all over the application. The company can also schedule a monthly supply of the product as soon as the prescription is provided by the doctor.

Well though this seems to be a good plan, the second thought would be the hospitals already having an established system to keep track of these records. So what problem are we actually solving with this product? The connection between the doctor and the patient which helps the doctor develop better trust and relationship with the patient. Plus tier 2 onwards city hospitals do not have an established system for patient records. So the right approach would be to check your targeted segment of Institutional Business and understand the break up of private to public institutions and conclude with the impact of this digital product in the business.

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