Children and youth with behavioral health needs often interact with multiple systems, including child welfare, juvenile justice, education, healthcare, and community-based providers, each with its own processes, timelines, and priorities. While these systems are designed to provide support, the reality for many families is a fragmented and difficult-to-navigate experience marked by service delays, repeated transitions, and unmet needs. These breakdowns can contribute to unnecessary placements, prolonged hospital stays, or reliance on restrictive settings that may not be in a child’s best interest.

Journey mapping offers a powerful, person-centered approach to understanding and improving these complex service pathways. By visually documenting a real, de-identified case from the first point of system contact through ongoing services and transitions, journey mapping brings an entire experience into a single narrative. This visualization highlights key decisions, service handoffs, wait periods, and moments of escalation or stabilization, allowing stakeholders to clearly see where the system supported a child effectively and where it fell short. Unlike traditional engagement methods that capture isolated feedback, journey mapping provides a holistic view of how systems function in practice and how families experience them.

Journey mapping is a collaborative process. Agencies use these visual case narratives to convene cross-system partners, including leadership, frontline staff, providers, and individuals with lived experience, for structured discussions. Together, participants explore what happened, identify system gaps, and consider “what if” scenarios to imagine alternative responses. These conversations often surface opportunities for earlier intervention, stronger coordination between agencies, expanded community-based services, and smoother transitions across systems.

Public Consulting Group (PCG) partners with state and local agencies to design and facilitate journey mapping initiatives that translate insight into action. From case selection and visualization to collaborative sessions and implementation support, PCG helps agencies embed journey mapping into continuous quality improvement efforts. By grounding system redesign in the lived experiences of children and families, agencies can create more responsive, coordinated, and effective behavioral health systems, leading to better outcomes for those who need support most.

Read the full brief, Journey Mapping: How Case Visualization Reveals Gaps and Opportunities in Children’s Behavioral Health, to explore how this approach is helping agencies drive meaningful system change.