The visit ends. The confusion begins.
For most patients, leaving the hospital is not a moment of relief — it's the start of a new kind of uncertainty. What do I do next? What did the doctor actually say? How do I manage what comes after? And what is this bill?
The after-visit experience was broken. Not maliciously, not carelessly, but systematically. No one had mapped it. No one had asked the people living through it what it felt like from the inside.
Mapping the full journey from admission through post-discharge revealed a consistent pattern — institutional support dropped sharply the moment a patient left the building.
Every stakeholder we spoke to described a system well-designed for the acute care moment and largely undesigned for everything that followed. The discharge was where institutional attention ended. It was also where patient confusion began.
Working with the Journey Lead and cross-functional teams, I translated research findings into journey maps that made the patient experience visible — from diagnosis through discharge, home healthcare delivery, and payment resolution.
Recommendations focused on three areas: redesigning the after-visit summary to communicate in patient language; improving the home healthcare handoff with clearer touchpoints; and streamlining the payment experience to reduce confusion after discharge.