User Journeys

This section is the single source of truth for how each persona moves through Global Clinic from end to end. It consolidates the journeys that were previously split across the business-process workflows, the user-experience flows, and the implementation plan into one place, so a reader can find "what does persona X actually do" without hunting across documents.

The operational rules that support these journeys (clinic onboarding policy, payment and refund mechanics, escalation handling) stay in Business Processes and Workflows, and the screen-by-screen interface reference stays in User Experience. This section links to both where relevant.

How these journeys are organised

Every journey is filed under the lifecycle phase where it begins, matching the four operating phases of the managed 14-stage journey:

• Discover (stages 1 to 3): enquiry, records and triage, medical opinion. How a prospective patient finds care and earns a clinically informed recommendation.
• Plan (stages 4 to 7): quote, deposit and escrow, visa, travel. How a committed patient gets funded, documented and routed.
• Treat (stages 8 to 12): arrival, admission, procedure, recovery, discharge. In-country care delivery.
• Return (stages 13 to 14): follow-up care and close-out. Continuity of care after treatment.
• Cross-cutting: parallel verticals and journeys that span every phase or belong to staff personas (wellness, insurance, language and culture, clinic management, operations and governance).

A journey that crosses into a later phase is filed where it starts and notes the spillover.

Status legend

Each journey carries a status tag so readers can tell shipped behaviour from target behaviour:

• [Live]: built today in the Next.js / React / TypeScript reference implementation (mock-data backed) and exercisable in the public site, patient portal or clinic console.
• [Planned]: specified in the implementation plan but not yet built. These were folded in here so all journeys live in one place. The build detail behind each Planned journey (new screens, data-model changes, API contracts) stays in the implementation plan under docs/implementation/.

Screen references like U4 (updated screen) or N8 (new screen) inside Planned journeys point to the screen inventory in docs/implementation/01-screen-specs.md. They are kept so the journeys stay traceable to the build plan.

The 14-stage patient journey (the backbone) [Live]

The product is organised around one managed journey. Every other journey here either advances this spine, runs parallel to it, or operates it. Each stage has an accountable owner and a service-level target; these fields exist in the data model (Stage.owner, Stage.slaTarget) and are surfaced to the patient as a friendly blurb. The operations console that drives owners and SLAs is Planned.

flowchart LR
  subgraph Discover
    S1[1 Enquiry] --> S2[2 Triage] --> S3[3 Opinion]
  end
  subgraph Plan
    S3 --> S4[4 Quote] --> S5[5 Escrow] --> S6[6 Visa] --> S7[7 Travel]
  end
  subgraph Treat
    S7 --> S8[8 Arrival] --> S9[9 Admission] --> S10[10 Procedure] --> S11[11 Recovery]
  end
  subgraph Return
    S11 --> S12[12 Discharge] --> S13[13 Follow-up] --> S14[14 Close-out]
  end

End-to-end patient journey: the happy path [Live]

flowchart TD
  A[Patient enquires] --> B[Coordinator triages records]
  B --> C[Specialist issues opinion]
  C --> D[Itemised quote shared]
  D --> E{Patient accepts?}
  E -- No --> E1[Nurture / re-quote / close]
  E -- Yes --> F[Escrow funded]
  F --> G[Visa checklist + invitation letter]
  G --> H{Visa granted?}
  H -- Delayed --> H1[Visa exception playbook]
  H -- Yes --> I[Travel Desk books flights, stay, transfer]
  I --> J[Arrival + airport pickup]
  J --> K[Admission + pre-op]
  K --> L[Procedure]
  L --> M[Monitored recovery]
  M --> N[Discharge summary + medicines]
  N --> O[Tele-follow-up 7 / 30 / 90 days]
  O --> P[Close-out: final escrow release + verified review]

The defining property of the journey is that trust is engineered at each step: a fast first response, a clinically informed opinion, a transparent quote, protected money, a corridor-aware visa, a named coordinator, and structured follow-up. Slow or vague responses are the single biggest reason cross-border leads fail to convert, so the funnel stages carry the tightest SLAs.

Personas

The journeys reference the following personas. The first group are patient-side; the rest are staff and partners.

• Medical patient: an international patient seeking surgical or medical treatment in India.
• Wellness traveller: often self-funded and not ill, seeking AYUSH or preventive wellness programs.
• Attendant: a blood-relative who accompanies the patient (up to two, on the medical-attendant visa).
• Care / Wellness coordinator: the named human who stays with the case across the journey.
• Specialist: the credentialed clinician (in India) who issues the medical opinion.
• Clinic: the accredited hospital that lists, quotes, and delivers care.
• Finance / claims ops: escrow milestone release, refunds, and insurance reconciliation.
• Visa-ops: invitation letters, application submission, corridor rules.
• Travel Desk: flights, attendant-friendly stays, airport facilitation.
• Administrator: corridor Country Packs, insurer empanelment.
• Compliance / Medical Director: consent, audit, clinical escalation backstop.

Journey index

Persona to journey matrix