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Introduction to patient retention
Patient retention is an important facet of the healthcare industry as it helps improve patient outcomes and patient satisfaction, while also bringing a spike in the revenue of the healthcare practices.
Patient retention encompasses engaging with patients meaningfully, delivering quality care, building strong relationships, and providing an overall positive patient experience.
If a patient has a positive and satisfactory experience at your practice, retaining that patient becomes quite straightforward. If they have a negative experience, they’ll inevitably find an alternative practice/provider. Hence, Providing quality care is the most dominant factor when it comes to retaining patients.
If you’re a healthcare provider wanting actionable strategies for patient retention, you’ve knocked on the right window. Let’s jump right in!
Why should you care about patient retention?
There are several reasons why patient retention is important:
- Enhanced profitability: Did you know that a mere 5% increase in patient retention can enhance the practice’s profitability by 75%? If you provide quality care, your patients will want to receive treatment from you every time they face health issues. Moreover, you won’t have to worry about the marketing expenses for new patient acquisition.
- Enhanced patient outcomes: When you retain your patients, you provide continuity in care and panel management which means better health outcomes for your patients.
- Improved patient base: When you provide continuous and quality care, you retain your patients. These satisfied patients return for care and recommend you to their friends and family. This ultimately helps you build a loyal patient base, thereby increasing your practice’s reputation and revenues.
- Saved costs: Did you know that acquiring new patients 5 times more expensive than retaining patients? If you retain your patients, you are generating the same amount of revenue without having to spend much on marketing and outreach activities to attract new patients.
- Word of mouth/referrals: While patient retention helps increase revenue, it also helps increase word-of-mouth referrals. If a patient is satisfied with the care received, they will recommend the provider/facility to friends, family, and colleagues. Word of mouth is the most trusted form of referral and is also quite a powerful marketing tool. While a positive referral can work wonders for a practice or provider, a negative referral can lead to a loss of revenue.
- Enhanced online reputation: Constant focus on patient retention is critical to maintaining a positive reputation. This can happen when you generate positive reviews from your patients. Providing high-quality care, developing strong doctor-patient relationships, and addressing queries are some ways to achieve those reviews and a strong online presence.
Irrespective of the healthcare setting you operate in, it is important to understand that patient retention will have a direct impact on the overall growth of your practice.
How is patient retention measured?
In addition to patient retention rate, there are several ways to measure patient retention:
- Repeat visits: One of the best ways to measure retention is to look at the repeat visit history of your practice. You can use your EHRs to analyze the patients who return to your practice after a certain time.
- Patient satisfaction surveys: With patient satisfaction surveys you get valuable feedback on the patient experience and quality of care that you provide. You can use such surveys to identify areas of improvement and track changes in patient experience and satisfaction over a period of time.
- Net promoter score: The NPS is used to track patient loyalty and measure patient retention. You can track the likelihood of your patients recommending your practice on a scale of 0-10. Then based on the data, you can subtract the detractors (who rated between 0-5) from the promoters (who rated 6-10).
- Patient loyalty score: This will provide you with an all-encompassing insight into the loyalty of your patients towards you. For this, you need to identify the factors that contribute to loyalty, develop a score for it (a rating scale), conduct surveys, and analyze the results with this score as a parameter. You can monitor this score over time to identify trends and highlight areas of improvement.
- Referral rates: Referral rates are another excellent indicator to measure patient retention. You can track the number of patients who refer your practice to others. Most likely the patients who refer doctors and practices are the ones who often pay a visit.
Patient Acquisition vs Patient Retention
Patient acquisition and patient retention are the two most important pillars of any healthcare practice. While the former is required to grow the customer base, the latter helps ensure profitability and long-term success of the healthcare practice.
Fun fact:
The probability of retaining an existing patient is 60-70% whereas to acquire a new patient is only 5-20%.
Key focus areas for patient acquisition:
- Conversion rate
- Cost per acquisition
- ROI
Key focus areas for patient retention:
- Patient Satisfaction
- Net Promoter Score
- Lifetime Value
How to Calculate Patient Retention Rate
Let’s say that your practice has 500 patients at the beginning of the year (S), you acquired 100 new patients during the year (N) and had 450 patients towards the end of the year (E). The patient retention rate for the year would be:
Retention Rate = [(E-N)/S] X 100 = [(450-100)/500] X 100 = 70%
It implies that your practice retained 70 per cent of the patients during a given year. With this metric, you will easily identify the areas for improvement and also align the best practices to improve your retention rate.
How to improve patient retention: 12 strategies to implement
Provide Quality Care
This is the most crucial prerequisite for you to ensure that patients keep returning to you for treatment. When a patient enters a practice, they come with certain expectations: their health issues will be taken care of, their queries will be resolved, and the quality of treatment they receive will be well thought out and tailored as per their needs and preferences.
As a provider, you need to develop a strong relationship with your patient, focus on patient-centred care, regularly review the processes related to their care, gather their feedback, monitor the health outcomes, and have robust safety protocols in place to avoid errors in treatment.
Make Booking Appointments Easier
When it comes to booking appointments, you must ensure that the process of the same is seamless and straightforward. You can offer the option of scheduling appointments online. With such an option, your patients won’t have to dial your practice and can easily book appointments at their own convenience.
It will help the patient fit your schedule easily according to your availability and theirs too. Emitrr allows you to book appointments, send confirmation links about your appointment, and update on your upcoming appointments, thereby keeping you and your patient on the same page. Here’s an example:
Follow up on no-shows
Did your patients not show up on the day of the appointment? Well, every no-show means an empty and wasted slot and a loss of revenue for that slot. The reason for your patients missing appointments can be anything; maybe something urgent came up or they simply forgot. You can make up for that missed appointment by sending up a follow-up text to your patients.
Something as simple as “Hey, you missed your appointment that was scheduled at 3:00 pm today. Please click on this link to reschedule it.” sent via text will remind your patients that they need to book a visit as they missed their previous appointment. This not only shows that you would be happy to see them on a future date but also highlights your intent to ensure quality care.
Have a recall and reactivation system in place
Do you think about patients who availed of treatment from you a while ago? While you can always reach out to those inactive patients. You need to pull out those old patients from your database and them personalized messages encouraging them to return for care. This strategy always works for patient recall and reactivation and in turn, improves patient retention.
Those messages can include special promotions, incentives on certain treatments, and free consultations. You can automate this entire process and send them scheduled text messages which saves you time, while also fulfilling your objective of retaining lapsed patients.
Ensure Good Patient Experience
Unfortunately, the patient experience is not solely dependent on the quality of care, your patient intake process, the way your staff communicates, scheduling and rescheduling options etc. all play a major role in ensuring a good patient experience.
So make sure you focus on these smaller elements as well so that all the patients that walk into your practice become advocates for your practice.
Build relationships with your patients
You must ensure to build strong relations with your patients and help them develop a feeling of trust whenever they visit you. To build such a bond, you need to constantly engage with them by sending them seasonal greetings, wishing them on their birthdays, following up on their health, and sending them special offers.
Doing so will make your patients loyal to your practice and they will always think of you whenever they or their loved ones require care.
Ask for feedback
Whenever your patients receive care, you can always prompt them to provide feedback on the overall quality of care. You can send out a patient survey, or a feedback form, or simply ask them to review you on Google or Facebook. Not only will this add to your engagement efforts but will also improve your online reputation.
Make a calendar
Another easy yet mandatory patient retention strategy is to make a communication calendar. Would you like to receive a call or text from your healthcare centre asking how you are? Make yourself a calendar and stay in touch with your patients who visited you asking them how they are doing and if they require any assistance from their health team.
Be responsive
Being responsive is one of the most important elements that you need to take into consideration in order to retain your patients. Answer the queries of your patient on the website or call instantly. This develops a healthy and trustworthy relationship with your customers.
Focus on Panel Management
Panel management is the practice of identifying and addressing the health needs of patients on an ongoing basis. This approach can help enhance patient retention by offering personalized care to patients that align with their needs and preferences.
It includes identifying high-risk patients, scheduling regular follow-up appointments, providing preventive care services, utilizing technology to facilitate care, and implementing care teams to ensure coordinated care.
Use technology
Technology is a powerful tool to retain patients if used in the right manner. There are a lot of ways in which healthcare providers can utilize technology to retain patients, improve patient engagement and experience and also provide easy options for patient communication.
A patient communication and engagement tool like Emitrr can automate the entire process for you, thereby streamlining your operations and helping you increase your retention rate.
Communicate effectively
When you communicate clearly and consistently with your patients, you enhance patient satisfaction and gain their trust. Make sure that you share all the relevant information about the patient’s medical condition with the patient as well as the staff involved to ensure the best possible care. This will make the patients more engaged with their treatment process and will make them feel valued.
Learn more about acquiring and retaining patients here:
Improve patient retention with Emitrr’s advanced texting capabilities
Patient behavior is undergoing significant changes with time, especially the way in which they communicate with healthcare providers. Texting has become an indispensable part of patient communication and if you haven’t yet leveraged it, you need to adopt it as soon as you can. You need to have a system in place to constantly engage with your patients and offer consistency in care and service. This starts right from booking appointments and continues till post-treatment care.
With patient communication and engagement software like Emitrr, you can initiate and automate various activities that’ll help you retain patients such as –
- Appointment reminders
- Automated texts and emails
- Survey and feedback
- Medical forms
- Online appointment scheduling
Also, you can track and monitor your upcoming appointments and use those metrics to improve conversion rates.
Conclusion
If you are a healthcare practitioner, then merely acquiring new patients isn’t important; retaining them is equally crucial. With the aforementioned strategies, you can improve patient retention, thereby enhancing sales and growing your revenue by manifolds. You can also make use of the Emitrr software to improve patient retention; right from managing calls to texting your patients, from scheduling appointments to responding to missed calls.
Are you ready to double down your efforts and use the right set of tools to see visible results? Book a demo to see how you can benefit from Emitrr’s offerings.
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