Analyze and delight to improve patient retention

While every healthcare business focuses on getting new patients to grow, no number of new patients can help a practice if they don’t stick around. That’s why patient retention rate should quickly become one of the next priorities for healthcare businesses.

Introduction

If there is anything that businesses focus on as much as getting new customers is how to keep those customers around for long. Corporations spend just as much time on ensuring that their customers stay loyal as on bringing them over in the first place. This is because while customer acquisition can be incredibly expensive, customer retention is much more lucrative in comparison. Not only do businesses spend less when trying to customers but they reap bigger investments as a result.

But retention is important in every consumer-facing business. Patient retention is a crucial part of any healthcare business. Patient acquisition costs are one of the biggest financial drains for healthcare businesses and medical practices. With retention, healthcare businesses are able to focus on ensuring that all their hard work to attract patients doesn’t go to waste with short relationships.

Retaining patients is an opportunity to build relationships with patients and develop trust before they even enter your premises, as well as get them back when they need you most. But it doesn’t happen by accident: it takes time, effort, and investment to turn patients into loyal customers. While retaining patients can be extremely beneficial, it can’t be an ad hoc process for your healthcare businesses. Without adequate focus and resources, retaining patients is extremely tough.

Below are some tips for improving patient retention by analyzing and delighting your patient’s needs.

What is patient retention?

Patient retention is a key metric in measuring the success of a healthcare provider. It’s also an important indicator of the quality of care a patient receives. Patient retention measures how many patients return to your practice or hospital after they have been discharged. For most medical businesses, it is measured by calculating the percentage of patients out of the total patients who visit your business multiple times.

Patient retention is important because it shows that you’re providing quality care and keeping your patients happy, but it can also indicate other things about your practice’s patient experience. Patient retention allows healthcare businesses to understand how long-term trends can play out for their business. Higher retention rates mean that a medical business can hope to have longevity in its success and can more effectively navigate environmental changes. While you can always try to get more patients, the more patients you lose the higher the number of new patients you’ll need.

Also importantly, retention is also a proxy indicator of patient experience in hospital settings. Why? Read on below.

Why is patient retention important?

Patient retention is important for all companies. A business that loses customers will quickly go out of business. The same applies to healthcare businesses like hospitals, clinics, and doctors’ offices. When patients are unhappy with the service they receive at a medical practice, they often leave and never return. This results in less revenue for the practice and higher costs from lost reimbursements from insurance companies.

Retention is also important for patients themselves. If you have a health condition that requires regular treatment or monitoring by a doctor or nurse in order to stay healthy, it makes sense that you would want to keep seeing that same provider over time so you don’t have to go through the learning curve again with someone new each time something changes in your condition (or if there’s any chance of miscommunication).

Patient retention can often be seen as a realized indicator of the patient experience during the healthcare journey in a healthcare setting. Lower retention rates may be indicative of low patient satisfaction scores and poor patient experience. At the same time, higher retention rates indicate that there is high patient satisfaction and high patient experience because patients would not return for no reason.

But as healthcare businesses understand more profoundly why patient experience is important, they also realize that improving retention rates is not an easy task.

How to improve patient retention

At the end of the day, every patient is different. So how do you know what your patients want? The solution is simple: ask them.

There are a number of ways to do this—you can survey your current patients through email, social media or even using a tablet at the front desk. You could also use an online platform like Survey Monkey or Qualaroo that makes it easy for you to set up surveys in one click without any programming knowledge needed.

Once you’ve asked your patients what they want and started implementing changes based on their feedback (which means making it easier for them to book appointments, get prescriptions and pay), take another step back and check whether they’re happy with their experience overall by asking them again!

But there are other questions that you can ask as well but not to your patients but to your practices and to yourself. Through careful analysis, you can find out the answers to questions about your post-operative care, non-medical support for patients, and understanding which touchpoints matter the most for your patients. Questions like, are you offering enough post-operative support for those who have had surgery, are there enough resources for new mothers when they leave the hospital with their newborns, and how do people feel about their experience at your facility after seeing specialists on an outpatient basis, will help you understand which areas need improvement to see higher patient retention rates.

But while that covers the analysis portion of the retention improvement process, the other portion is just as important.

Patient experience

Patient experience is the emotional connection between a patient and your brand. It’s more than just the patient experience you deliver, it’s the sum of all interactions that occur for that patient to reach their desired outcome (i.e., being seen at a visit, having a prescription filled). The following diagram illustrates this concept:

The key takeaway here is that no matter how great your care is, if you don’t make sure it’s delivered consistently, every time, and however they want it (online or in-person), then you’re not going to retain patients long-term.

To improve patient retention, you first need to understand what your patients want. Then, once you have a better idea of their needs and wants, it’s time to continually delight them.

To do this, you’ll be using data: both the information that’s already in your system and the data that comes in from other sources. You can also use this information to create personas or customer profiles based on your patients’ characteristics and experiences with your practice. This will help guide how best to improve their experience at every step along their journey with you (which we’ll explain more about later).

Your earlier analyses will help you in understanding which parts of your healthcare processes need the most improvement and which processes have the best impact on your patients. The happier your patients are, the more likely they are to stay loyal to your medical business.

But another important way that you can delight your patients is through better engagement. Using digital marketing channels to improve your engagement with patients is one of the best ways to drive greater patient experiences. Patients today want medical professionals who listen to them and explain to them what their medical journeys will look like. Patients also rely on medical professionals to understand what their healthcare costs will look like. With so much dissatisfaction in these areas, there are plenty of opportunities for your medical practice to use engagement to fulfill these needs that patients have and drive higher patient experiences.

Conclusion

We’ve covered a lot of ground in this article, from defining patient retention to understanding its importance and how to improve it. By keeping these tips in mind, you can start to make a difference in the lives of your patients today.

Patient retention today is quickly emerging as the key metric that helps medical businesses understand their real-world success and what their longevity may look like. Retention doesn’t only have a purely financial impact but as a proxy indicator of patient experiences, it also helps medical professionals understand what their medical practice is doing right or wrong.

BraveLabs helps medical businesses to improve their patient retention rates by providing analytical tools to measure their processes and digital marketing solutions to improve their communication and engagement with their patients. Contact us today to learn how much your patient retention rates can improve.

BraveLabs is a digital marketing agency for the Healthcare & Pharma industries.