Development of a Boundary Object Supported Method to Study Children’s Healthcare Customer Journeys

Healthcare is a major service industry that contributes substantially to the gross domestic product of developed economies and employs a significant number of people. Understanding and developing customer experiences and the customer journeys of patients, has become one of the fundamental aims of today’s high-quality healthcare systems. However, in healthcare, customer journeys, throughout which the customer experience emerges, are challenging to study and capture because they are complex spatial and temporal constructs. During the customer journey, a patient engages resources from a diverse set of actors within the healthcare ecosystem, not only in the settings facilitated by the healthcare providers, but also beyond healthcare settings, including family, friends, and patient networks. From the standpoint of a researcher or organization, understanding customer journeys from the perspective of the patient-healthcare provider dyad is therefore no longer adequate, and broader and more holistic approaches are needed to truly capture and understand such journeys. The study of customer journeys of young children, who may have difficulties describing their holistic and cumulative experiences due to potentially less-developed cognitive competencies and tendencies to address those experiences from narrower perspectives than adults, is particularly challenging. To support the shift toward a broader and more holistic understanding of children’s healthcare customer journeys, this paper presents a novel qualitative data collection method for researchers and healthcare organizations. The method relies on functional, playful, and flexible boundary objects for translating the theoretical underpinnings of the spatial-temporal customer journey that is created in the healthcare ecosystem. Studies conducted using this method could provide a broader and more holistic understanding of children’s healthcare customer experiences, which are formed during complex journeys that are difficult to examine with conventional methods. This, in turn, provides information critical for managers who are rethinking their service delivery and about aligning this delivery with other actors in the healthcare ecosystem or finding opportunities to develop further service offerings.