What Is Patient Retention and Why Does It Matter for Your Practice?
Without patients, even the best doctor won’t see profit, and their practice will fail. But your goal isn’t just to land new ones; you need to keep the patients you do have coming back when they need assistance.
In this blog post, we are going to dive into the importance of patient retention. If you’d like more information on how to keep the patients you have, check out Patient Retention Strategies for Reducing Leakage.
What Is Patient Retention?
Patient retention in healthcare is more or less what it sounds like: keeping the patients who turn to your practice loyal to you.
While your goal is to heal people, not keep them coming back for repetitive treatments, most specialties see people with chronic conditions, conditions that need a series of treatments, or in the case of general practices, people who need help with different ailments and conditions over time.
Patient retention is measured as a percentage of your total patients who return to you for multiple visits. While this can be difficult to measure in certain cases, ultimately, it is an essential metric for measuring your practice’s success.
Why Does Patient Retention Matter?
Patient retention benefits are pretty easy to understand. Just like with a standard business, it is easier and cheaper to bring in repeat customers than land new ones. On top of that, having loyal patients boosts your reputation. While word-of-mouth referrals aren’t the basis of medical marketing the way they once were, they are still essential to your success.
How to Improve Patient Retention
When people have a good experience with you, even if the news you deliver isn’t great, they are more likely to return to you when they have a need in the future. While there are certain aspects that are out of your hands—think lack of transportation or finances—many factors that impact patient retention are within your ability to change.
For example, speaking to your patients kindly and displaying empathy, actively listening to their concerns, and being flexible where possible can help keep patients coming back to you for help. Work to answer questions promptly and pay attention to the feedback you are getting.
Patient retention is an essential part of a medical practice’s success. In fact, it can be the difference between profit and loss for your clinic. If you are looking to improve patient satisfaction or retain more patients in general, we have solutions that will help you.
We know all about retaining patients because we work with practices just like yours every day. For healthcare solutions that will keep patients happy, including healthcare CRMs, work with Sequence Health.