Adapted from a paper presented at EphMRA 2026.
Patient journey studies are among the most requested pieces of research in pharma, but increasingly, we’ve noticed they seem to be becoming a little generic. The patient journey brief has become a “must-do” tick-box exercise, sent out on autopilot regardless of where an asset sits in its lifecycle or what decision it’s actually meant to inform.
None of this happens through bad intentions. Typically, a brief asks for an in-depth understanding of the patient journey – for example who’s doing what, the emotional drivers, the barriers and the pain points – captured using a named methodology, a defined sample, with a long list of deliverables. It usually comes with a long list of research questions/ requests too.
It’s a familiar shape, and there is nothing inherently wrong with any single element of it.
What’s usually missing is the one question that should shape everything else: what decision will this journey actually inform?
The cost of a broad brief
When the context is vague, the natural response is to design comprehensively in order to try to hit “everything.” The results might be genuinely rich, but they’re often hard to navigate, don’t obviously connect to the decision the team is trying to make, and take longer to deliver than the business may be able to wait.
The comprehensive approach does have its place. Ahead of a launch, when a brand is entering the market and leadership needs to align around a positioning and go-to-market plan, depth and breadth offer incredible insight: journey posters, pain-point maps and voice-of-the-patient videos are powerful tools for engaging local marketing teams and grounding a creative strategy in the human problem the brand is solving. However, this approach has become the default, applied at every lifecycle stage regardless of whether that stage calls for it.
Three decisions, three very different journeys
We have taken three case studies from our own work to demonstrate our point. Each asks for a “patient journey” but each requires a fundamentally different design.
The Crystal Ball – Is the molecule worth continued investment?
The first, which we call the Crystal Ball, was to support early asset development. A Phase 2a oral PCSK9 inhibitor facing competition from therapies launching sooner. The decision on the table was whether the molecule was worth continued investment. A classic, deeply immersive journey wasn’t the answer; launch was years away, and a rich emotional picture of today’s journey wouldn’t tell the team what they needed to know about tomorrow’s. Instead, a lighter, future-focused design built around KOLs, patient advocacy groups and desk research gave a clear view of who the key stakeholders are, and how the patient journey may evolve. It also provided a prioritised set of addressable unmet needs and the evidence and risks the team needed to plan for. All delivered within the short timeline required.
The Access Lens – How can we secure reimbursement with no long-term outcomes data?
The second, the Access Lens, involved a first-in-class SGLT2 inhibitor preparing to launch in heart failure with reduced ejection fraction. The decision was how to secure reimbursement for a chronic condition in a broad patient population, with no long-term outcomes data yet available. That called for analysis of real-world evidence rather than a conventional patient journey: a longitudinal, quantitative cohort study of claims and EHR data, identifying the avoidable costs of not treating and the patient segments carrying the greatest burden. The insight needed to be robust enough to stand up to payer scrutiny and feed directly into a budget impact model.
The Care Lens – How can we ensure patients stay on track?
The third, the Care Lens, came after launch. An innovative oncology treatment had specific, demanding requirements for patients, and the team suspected (correctly) that patients were getting lost in the process. Here, the right design was narrow, not broad: an immersive walk-through of one specific stage of the journey with patients and care-partners, using a jobs-to-be-done framework to surface exactly what wasn’t working, for whom, and why. The output wasn’t a rich, emotive picture of the whole journey, rather it was a friction map precise enough to prioritise fixes, one of which was simply rewriting patient materials in plainer language.
Same label, different tools
Three studies, all commissioned under the same “patient journey” label, each needing a different output logic – rich and emotional to enable brand strategy, agile and directional to enable an investment decision, robust and specific to enable cost modelling, or focused and practical to enable optimisation.
The takeaway here is that patient journeys are powerful, but they are a decision-making tool, not a one-size-fits-all methodology. When we take a patient journey brief, rest assured we will resist the pull toward the default template. At Branding Science, we start by asking what decision this journey needs to inform, to ensure that each study is designed correctly for your specific need.