Five Steps to Patient Journey Mapping for Medical Device and Medical Technology Sales
Three Part Series on Big Data, Big Business in MedTech: Part 2
The patient’s journey from diagnosis to treatment can be a long and winding road. For medical device and technology sales professionals, understanding this journey is essential for developing strategies that will empower both physicians and patients to make informed decisions when it comes to choosing the right course of treatment.
By researching care pathways for specific conditions and treatments, mapping out touchpoints in the patient journey, educating physicians on new technologies/therapies available, empowering patients through informative content pieces, and developing marketing strategies that support both parties alike – medical device sales teams have a greater chance of reaching physicians faster with reliable product information while simultaneously providing guidance to patients seeking better outcomes faster.
Researching Care Pathways
When it comes to researching care pathways for specific conditions and treatments, it’s important to look at the whole picture. Start by gaining an understanding of the patient’s journey from diagnosis to treatment, including any steps or touchpoints the patient must go through in order to reach their desired outcome or sometimes to find answers to a scary and painful condition.
Look into the different types of professionals a patient typically interacts with or may be referred to along their journey, such as doctors, nurses, and physical therapists. Once you have a good grasp on the overall landscape of care pathways for a specific condition or treatment, you can start drilling down into specifics.
Mapping Out the Patient Journey
To really understand the patient’s journey from diagnosis to treatment, it’s essential to map out all the touchpoints along their paths. This will help you pinpoint key areas where marketing strategies can be used to engage physicians and patients alike.
Consider how physicians make decisions when prescribing treatments and devices – what information do they rely on? What resources are available to them? Are there any gaps in knowledge that need to be filled?
The Role of Physician Education
Physician education is critical for helping patients find the right course of treatment faster and more effectively. Physicians need access to reliable data-backed evidence so they can make informed decisions about which device or therapy is best suited for a particular patient’s needs. This means providing them with comprehensive training materials so they can better understand how certain medical technologies or devices work or have been effective.
Developing Marketing Strategies that Support Patients and Physicians Alike
In addition to physician education, it’s also important to develop marketing strategies that empower both physicians and patients alike when making informed decisions about treatments and devices.
Construct sales strategies and outreach that target physicians with relevant product data based on their specialty areas and curate information and places where healthcare professionals can share challenges they face with treating certain conditions or using certain devices/therapies so solutions can be found quickly and easily.
Here are our five pro tips:
Identify the index event that your device or therapy directly impacts (eg. for a spine implant, use spine fusion reimbursement codes)
Define the patient cohort inclusion and exclusion criteria for the patient journey (eg. for spine fusion procedures, exclude trauma patients)
Use a longitudinal dataset across care settings to get the most visibility into how patients traverse the variety of care pathways
Determine trigger encounter logic to get rid of unrelated care (eg. for lower back pain, identify diagnoses that are related to the condition)
Use analytics tools to create visual representations of the journey to glean insights that might not readily appear in a database or spreadsheet.
You can find parts 1 and 3 of the “Big Data, Big Business in MedTech” blog series here:
Part 1: The Ultimate Guide to Selling Medical Devices and Medical Technology to Doctors in Five Steps
