OPD or the outpatient department is one of the busiest departments in a hospital, and the patients who visit your OPD are in need of exemplary service. 

To provide them with the best care, you need to know how patients experience the different touchpoints in their patient journey. This blog post will share some tips on tracking patient touch points from admission to discharge in the outpatient department (OPD).

Major Touchpoints in the Patient Journey

The patient journey begins even before the patients arrive at the clinic or the hospital. Patients touchpoints throughout the patient journey can be divided into three stages:

1. Before visiting the hospital: The patient journey begins when the patient makes an appointment, books a service, or registers a place in the queue, online or otherwise.
2. Visit: 
   • Reception: The patient's first point of non-virtual contact with the hospital is at the reception where they check-in and follow up on the already made reservation.
   • Queueing: While most hospitals have virtual queuing systems that allow patients to join the queue remotely, in some cases, the patient would actually have to wait before their token number is called.
   • Service: Here the patient is directly in contact with a medical staff of suitable skills.
   • Discharge: The patient comes in contact with discharge and billing services at this stage.
3. Post visiting the hospital: Post the service, the patient is often asked to give feedback on hospital services and quality of medical care, often through an online survey. This feedback can be used to improve patient journey mapping, which in turn improves patient experience, quality of care, and process efficiency, etc.

What is Patient Journey Mapping?

It is the process of tracking the different touch points or points of contact discussed earlier that patients will have with the hospital, and is an effective way to understand patients' experience with your hospital. 

Patient journey mapping helps administrators follow a patient's progress through the hospital.  It's a way to identify patients' needs and improve their experience and provides a bird’s eye view of the patient flow as well as detailed insights into each touchpoint throughout their journey.

What are the Steps Involved in Patient Journey Mapping?

1. Talk to medical staff and treatment providers to understand the different steps involved in patient care.
2. Get information from patients and understand what they want to achieve at the end of their journey.
3. Identify solutions for the pain points in the patient's journey.
4. Implement measures to improve patient experience at the touchpoints with the feedback collected.
5. Document the process and share it with your staff. 

Healthcare staff often suffer from workflow interruptions, the lack of proper communication between departments, stretched workforce which is not able to manage the wide array of tasks, etc, factors that might have a negative impact on the patient experience at various touchpoints. 

Insta’s new cloud-based hospital management system takes over simpler tasks that were otherwise handled by staff, centralizes data, and enables transparent communication between departments, thereby improving the quality of patient experience at your hospital.

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