Patient Retention And Why It Is Important For Your Practice
It is also safe to assume that a satisfied customer will have the ability to refer you to their circle of friends and family. This means more profits achieved through retention only without having to rely on paid marketing. As a medical practitioner, having this mentality steers your practice into a world of consistent business which is the purpose of practicing in the first place.
You should know that it is not possible to keep all your customers as some things are beyond your control. For example, when a customer relocates to a different town or city. It may be futile to try and convince them to continue using your services, but it’s not impossible. Certain measures should be taken to ensure that you achieve your goal in retaining most of your clients. Here are some tips you can use for patient retention.
Developing a good healthcare marketing strategy
As you develop your business, ask your team to work on retention of existing patients. The advantage will be to create relationships that go above and beyond primary care without losing the business aspect.
All online notifications, messages and advertising to existing customers should be engaging with a personal touch. Such efforts will make your customers always keep you in mind and improve the patient experience. Strategies could include emails that aim to remind patients of their next appointment or highlighting case studies.
A wellness newsletter that introduces a new service and the privileges that come with it. To a great extent, even engaging clients with a survey will help keep your facilities relevant in the back of their mind.
Public concern
As a medical practitioner, the oath you took upon receiving your practicing certificate to protect life is by far the most important. You owe it to society to improve the healthcare of your population.
Through patient retention, you will be able to track, prevent and control the spread to the population. This can reduce morbidity and the premature mortality of people in your area. At the same time, it can lead to improved health of the population.
An online social media marketing program can enlighten your patients on the value of honoring appointments. For example, an HIV/ AIDS patient who misses out on appointments might have a longer stay in the hospital. Requiring more patient care than one who abides by an appointment schedule. Such truant patients might also use emergency services and resources more often from other practices.
Develop a listening ear
Actively listening to patient problems ranks highest in your job description as a medical practitioner. Some may be so trivial yet to your patient be a great deal. So big that it may make them seek professional help elsewhere. Client issues may not be medical. Sometimes you might not be able to change the situation that affect them.
Through patient engagement, you show them that you care about them. After all, they come to you for your professional care why not add a touch of concern?
Create mental awareness of patient retention strategies
Optimize the experience the moment they walk into your clinic; they should see enough marketing posters and pamphlets that emphasize good health. This will prepare the patient mentally while they wait. It will also show the concern you place in the collective responsibility of a healthy population.
Nurture the needs of your patients to place enough weight on the value of preventive measures. Cultivate the seed of prevention as opposed. They should be aware of the difference between the two. One difference is while prevention means regular appointments, in the long run, it means reduced medical expenses.
Regular visits also keep the body in check and can help detect and find issues at their earliest stage.
Know your attrition and retention rate
Attrition rate refers to the percentage of patients walking away from your services. Having a low attrition rate (highly recommended) means that most of your revenue is via existing patients. A simple way to determine your attrition rate is to take the sum of your new patients (even short term patients) and divide that by the total number of patients you received that year.
In the long run, management of the final figure will disclose how costly it to get new customers versus keeping existing customers. As a rule, it is better to determine how many new patients your practice needs each month. This determines the revenue generated by new patients and how much marketing effort to expend on patient recruitment.
All factors considered, your clinic will make a profit while at the same time keeping your patients healthy and satisfied. Never take for granted the number of patients lost in a year and regularly ask for feedback.
Both the BioScan MSA and BioScan SRT can generate objective reports helps with patient retention by charting their progress. Please contact us to learn more on how BioScan can be integrated into your practice.