Dental Patient’s Journey Map: Introduction to Patient’s Touchpoints

Introduction: Consumer journey analysis or mapping is an increasingly popular strategic management tool praised by both academics and practitioners for its usefulness in understanding an organization’s consumer experience. In the dental sector this could also be a useful tool to enhance the service experience and improve strategic tools of modern dental offices. It seems that as care becomes more patient-centered, care teams need a “single pane” view of the entire dental patient journey.

Aim: In this article, we aim to share insights on the importance of mapping out the dental patient’s journey to better understand the needs and the impulses that make him choose practitioners and services, and we will mainly focus on identifying dental patients’ touchpoints.

Methods: For this article, we gathered articles from PubMed, Google Scholar, Academia, and ResearchGate. We first highlighted consumer engagement for a good branding framework. Secondly, we defined touchpoints’ meaning and clarify how they are used today in the world of marketing. Thirdly, we explored the specific engagement behaviors of dental patients according to the relevant touchpoints of a normal dental journey.

Conclusion: Few articles exist on dental touchpoints and branding for dentistry. In the business marketing, there are specific key strategic initiatives at each touchpoint that could be used in the dental field. This initiative can result in a cross functional input aimed to advance dental service innovation with numerous advantages in everyday clinical dentistry. The outcome will be the improvement in the quality of the dental services resulting in a more profitable dental practice.

Keywords: Engagement behaviors; Consumer touchpoints; Customer journey map; Back-of-stage interactions; Touchpoint mapping; Dental branding