Children with behavioral health needs who are involved in child welfare, juvenile justice, schools, and other human service systems often navigate complex, fragmented, multi-agency systems. For some, involvement across multiple systems can delay or prohibit treatment progress, resulting in unnecessary removals from home, delays in services, placement disruptions, or placement in restrictive settings.

Journey mapping is a method of visually representing an individual’s path through systems of care. It documents key events, services, transitions, and decisions from initial contact through treatment and beyond. By consolidating information into a single, chronological visualization, it allows participants to clearly see how a case unfolds, highlighting critical gaps, inefficiencies, and turning points.

PCG’s new brief, Journey Mapping: How Case Visualization Reveals Gaps and Opportunities in Children’s Behavioral Health, explores the use of journey mapping in children’s behavioral health, highlighting how these methods have been applied to reveal service gaps and complexities and to generate creative solutions for improving youth and family experiences and outcomes.

“Youth with complex mental health needs often have experiences that are misunderstood, leading to ineffective community-based interventions and repeated cycling in and out of intensive residential services. Journey mapping offers a way to center and elevate the youth’s perspective, helping to uncover the root causes of how current systems fall short,” said Kristen Gore, co-author of the brief. “By mapping these lived experiences and engaging stakeholders in meaningful dialogue, we can identify systemic gaps and design more responsive, upstream solutions, ultimately supporting children and families earlier, and reducing the likelihood of crisis.”

How Journey Mapping Works

Unlike traditional feedback methods, such as surveys or interviews, journey mapping provides a holistic, person-centered perspective. It centers the lived experiences of children and families, helping agencies better understand how systems function in practice rather than in theory. The process typically involves five steps:

1. Case Selection and Data Gathering: Real cases are chosen and relevant records (assessments, service histories, court reports) are compiled.
2. Case Analysis and Visualization: Information is organized into a timeline and transformed into a visual journey map, highlighting services, transitions, and pain points.
3. Community Partner Engagement: The map is reviewed with community partners to identify successes and breakdowns.
4. Collaborative Problem-Solving: Participants collectively explore alternative scenarios and potential solutions to improve outcomes.
5. Documentation and Action Planning: Insights are documented and then translated into actionable recommendations, policy changes, or service redesign initiatives.

“By focusing on real-life experiences, journey mapping helps us identify genuine barriers and practical solutions, ensuring our efforts are grounded in reality. This method also broadens our perspective, deepening empathy and leading to more relevant, effective recommendations,” said Sarah Sparks, co-author of the brief. “By clearly visualizing each step in the process, participants can spot gaps and opportunities for meaningful improvement.”

Journey mapping can be catalysts for meaningful system change in child welfare, juvenile justice, and children’s behavioral health delivering several benefits:

• Reveals systemic gaps and barriers by showing exactly where breakdowns occur.
• Centers lived experience, emphasizing the perspectives of those directly affected in decision making.
• Supports cross-agency collaboration, aligning agencies around better data sharing.
• Guides policy and service redesign, identifying where resources and interventions are most needed.

By making complex service journeys visible, it helps agencies move beyond abstract metrics to understand real experiences and outcomes. The result is more responsive, coordinated, and effective care systems that better meet the needs of vulnerable children and families.

“Journey mapping is an imperative, but often neglected, part of the engagement process when discussing behavioral health systems change because it centers the voice of those most affected,” said Kacie Schlegel, co-author of the brief. “The process is driven by real life cases instead of hypotheticals. This allows for systems change to be grounded in more responsive and compassionate service designs that ultimately improve outcomes for children and families.”

Learn more:

• Read Journey Mapping: How Case Visualization Reveals Gaps and Opportunities in Children’s Behavioral Health
• PCG’s Children’s Behavioral Health Services Consulting
• Other PCG Insights and Thought Leadership

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