In the evolving oncology landscape, effective cancer care requires navigating a complex patient care pathway involving multiple specialists, diagnostic evaluations, treatment decisions, and ongoing monitoring. For Biopharmaceutical and MedTech companies, oncology patient journey mapping serves as a powerful strategic tool to identify unmet needs, understand care and technology gaps, and prioritize areas for future innovation and investment.
Understanding the Oncology Patient Journey
While each pathway may differ by cancer type and individual patient, an oncology patient journey represents the different stages which a patient moves through: Screening, Evaluation and Diagnosis, Treatment, and Follow-up and Monitoring
At each stage, patients interact with different healthcare professionals, medical devices and technologies, and care settings. Therefore, for healthcare organizations, the key question becomes:
"Where are the biggest challenges in the patient journey, and where can care be meaningfully improved?"
Overview of Oncology Patient Journey Mapping
The patient journey mapping approach can help identify critical gaps and friction points across the care continuum, including opportunities in patient care coordination, clinical pathways and workflows, information exchange, patient monitoring, and continuity of care, which can then be translated into strategic priorities.
The resulting insights can provide an evidence base for prioritizing innovation and investment opportunities. By assessing identified needs alongside the potential impact and feasibility of available and emerging solutions, Biopharma and MedTech organizations can focus resources on areas with the greatest potential to improve patient care delivery and outcomes.
Oncology Patient Journey: Insights and Implications
Mapping the oncology patient journey is more than a way to visualize the sequence of care; it provides a strategic framework for understanding where innovation can create the greatest impact and enables healthcare organizations to make more informed decisions. Looking at the journey through the lens of technology, the patient journey framework allows us to:
Identify Gaps Across the Patient Care Continuum: Recognise challenges at transition points to improve coordination, efficiency, and continuity of patient care.
Differentiate Disease-Specific and Cross-Oncology Needs: Distinguish cancer-specific needs from shared oncology challenges and scalable technology opportunities.
Connect Unmet Needs with Technology Trends: Link emerging technologies to real-world patient journey gaps to identify actionable innovation and investment opportunities.
Build Long-Term Oncology Strategies Around Real-World Needs: Use patient and clinician needs as an evidence base for developing long-term, needs-driven oncology strategies.
Case Study: Technology Improvements Across Lung, Breast, and Prostate Cancer Patient Journeys
In one recent example, a global Product and Commercial team needed to understand how technology and emerging solutions can address identified gaps and pain points to improve the overall patient journey. Therefore, a comparative view across lung, breast, and prostate cancer was needed to distinguish disease-specific needs relative to common challenges across cancer types.
Business Objective
As a digital technology leader, the client needed a way to prioritize future investments that would enhance outcomes across the patient journey agnostic of a specific cancer type. To accomplish this, they needed to validate their understanding of customer challenges in the USA, UK, France, and Germany, systematically measure unmet needs, and assess possible solutions against strategic priorities.
Research Objectives
The study aimed to create optimal oncology care pathways and identify technology trends and investment opportunities that could address unmet needs across the cancer patient journey.
The study focused on three major cancer types:
Lung cancer
Breast cancer
Prostate cancer
Specifically, the research sought to:
Create an optimal care pathway for each cancer type
Identify the current challenges impeding optimal patient care delivery
Understand unmet needs for digital and IT-related solutions in oncology
Identify current and future technology trends and strategic investment areas
Methodology
The project used a two-phase research approach, combining qualitative and quantitative research with secondary desk research.
The methodology included:
60-minute qualitative in-depth interviews (IDIs)
Secondary desk research (SDR)
20-minute quantitative survey research
The research involved senior oncology stakeholders, including Heads of Medical Oncology and Radiation Oncology, as well as clinicians (urologists, pulmonologists, hepatologists, and breast oncologists).
Project Outcomes
Cetas Healthcare mapped the care pathways across the three cancer types and identified current and future technology trends at key points of the patient journey, including screening, evaluation and diagnosis, treatment, follow-up and monitoring.
Further, Cetas provided a framework for evaluating digital solutions that was grounded in deep understanding of the space and validated through inputs from the market.
The recommendations focused on priority areas for upcoming investments, which the client was able to further assess based on its long-term strategic plan. Through this research, the client was able to identify the most valuable investment opportunities to improve patient outcomes aligned to its strategy.
From Patient Journey Insights to Strategic Action
The value of patient journey mapping lies in what organizations can do with the insights.
By connecting the current state of oncology care with unmet needs and emerging technology trends, Biopharmaceutical and MedTech companies can:
Identify areas where current solutions may be insufficient
Prioritize long-term innovation opportunities across various types of cancer based on relevance and investment potential
Thus, patient journey mapping provides a lens through which companies can evaluate where innovation is possible and where it has strategic relevance.
Conclusion
Given the transforming oncology landscape across different types of cancer, with increasingly personalized treatment pathways, it is important to understand the patient journey as a foundation for informed decision-making in patient care. By revealing how patients move through diagnosis, treatment, monitoring, and follow-up, patient journey insights can help Biopharmaceutical and MedTech organizations identify unmet needs, understand variations in patient treatment pathways, and uncover opportunities to improve care coordination, treatment outcomes, and patient experience.
When connected to the broader strategic context, these insights can help organizations translate an in-depth understanding of patients and their journeys into targeted innovation, stronger strategic decisions, and better-informed investment priorities. Whether the focus is optimizing treatment pathways, identifying opportunities for new solutions or technologies, or shaping patient-centered strategies, patient journey mapping provides a framework for understanding where meaningful opportunities exist and how organizations can act on them.
"Get in touch with the Cetas Healthcare team to explore how patient journey research can inform your innovation and investment strategy."