A question we often hear from clients is: Even though we have data showing what’s happening across patient groups, why can’t we explain the reasons behind patient behavior? 

Adherence rates drop off a cliff at 90 days. Awareness campaigns reach people who still aren’t seeking care. Insured patients skip the preventive visits their plan covers.  

The data captures the outcome. It stays silent on the decision that produced it. 

That silence is where a patient-centered insights approach, Patient Access Pathways, lives. 

 

What traditional data misses 

Patient journey maps and claims data are remarkably good at recording what happens inside the health care system, but they reveal little about what happens outside it. The moment a prescription feels too confusing to fill, a preventive visit where a provider assumes a patient’s knowledge or the hours spent navigating insurance before giving up entirely — these are the decisions that shape whether patients enter care, stay in it or quietly fall away.   

They don’t generate claims. They don’t appear in registries. Yet they are often the most consequential part of the story. 

Reservoir’s Patient Access Pathways sits at the intersection of human-centered research and rigorous survey methodology — designed to uncover and measure the moments that determine whether patients engage in care or disappear from the data.  

To understand what Patient Access Pathways reveals in practice, consider the following examples. In each case, the data pointed to one explanation — but the patient’s perspective told a different story. 

 

The woman who knew, but never went 

In a national study on women’s preventive health, we found something that upended the entire communications strategy built around it: awareness wasn’t the problem. 

Nearly eight in ten women were already familiar with their care options, but only one in five had accessed health care in the past year. The gap wasn’t knowledge. It was the conversation that never happened. Only a third of women had discussed their health risks with a provider, yet most said they would seriously consider treatment if that conversation had taken place.  

The insight shifted the strategy entirely: away from reaching more people with more information and toward enabling providers to initiate conversations and address the structural barriers that persist even when awareness exists.  

 

The patient who kept trying to fill her prescription 

In a study of patients with a serious cardiovascular condition, low treatment persistence was widely attributed to side effects or disengagement. In reality, the main issue wasn’t how the medication was tolerated; it was what it took to get it. Hours spent navigating a complex system: one in four patients reported spending five or more hours in a three-month period just trying to access a prescribed medication. 

Patients weren’t disengaging; they were being worn down by the process of accessing treatment. 

That distinction shifted the intervention point — from patient education to the access process itself, and from adherence to navigation support. 

 

The insured person who never used what she paid for 

In a third study focused on insured individuals, satisfaction metrics appeared strong — nine in ten reported being at least somewhat satisfied with their plan. 

But when we looked deeper, a more complicated picture emerged. Many patients couldn’t anticipate what their care would cost, weren’t sure which services were covered or didn’t know how to access benefits they were already entitled to. That comprehension gap had real consequences: patients were deferring care, skipping preventive visits and disengaging from a plan they were otherwise satisfied with — not because the coverage wasn’t there, but because navigating it felt out of reach. 

 

Why this matters 

Each of these studies began the same way: solid data, a reasonable hypothesis and a strategy built around both. And in each case, the patient’s perspective revealed a different reality — one that administrative data alone couldn’t capture. 

These weren’t cases of non-adherence, lack of awareness or true satisfaction. They were stories of friction, missed moments and structural barriers.  

 

Patient Access Pathways exists to surface that layer of the story — not to replace claims data and journey mapping, but to explain what they can’t.  

Because understanding the why changes where you intervene, who you target and what you actually build. 

If you’re working with data, that tells you what’s happening — but not why — that’s the conversation we’d like to have.