Profit Driven Patient Acquisition, Engagement and Retention
- Combat no-show rates and optimize scheduling
- Understand your key performance indicators within your practice
- Manage and maintain a positive online reputation
- Get existing patients back in the door for follow-ups and recommended treatments
This webinar applies to ambulatory practice managers and physicians.
How to Close the Gap on Patient Acquisition and Retention
It’s a common belief that profits are directly correlated to patient marketing and acquisition. While that may be partially true, at Red Spot Interactive, we believe what you really need to be looking at is your patient acquisition and retention.
Improving Patient Acquisition
Let’s put this into business terms. The ability to acquire patients is primarily based on how you’re managing and scheduling new patients that come into your system.
Keeping track of and managing your patients involves counting how many phone calls come in and how many emails arrive throughout the day.
It’s important to consider whether your staff was able to answer all of these inquiries, and how many of them were actually scheduled.
The two most important factors to consider when managing your patient inquiries are consistency and speed. The best way to make sure you follow up with your patient inquiries is to have a uniform system in place for communication, like follow-up emails and reminder phone calls. Software, such as ours, can streamline this process, so you can focus on scheduling your appointments.
You also want to take into account the speed at which you’re reaching out to, and getting in touch with your patients. Medical practices tend to miss 20 percent of their phone calls every day. The more effective you are at capturing these inquiries, the more likely they will come into the office for a service.
Once the patient is acquired and patient scheduling has occurred, you need to make sure that the patient is retained.
Improving Patient Retention
Patient retention is where we really start to see a return on investment. To make sure you’re retaining patients in your office, it’s important to keep track of scheduled-to-attendance rates and follow up with patients regularly.
Improving your scheduled-to-attendance rate can be as simple as scheduling your patients closer to the time of the appointment call rather than later. You can also ensure patient attendance rates and retention go up by using follow-up emails, phone calls and surveys.
Following up with your patients is a sure-fire way to keep in touch after the time of the appointment, thereby improving retention rates. We recommend this be done with a simple email, easily automated with today’s modern technology, thanking them for their visit, a phone call from your office staff asking about their visit, or with an automated survey asking them to provide feedback to the practice. The patient will appreciate the personal touch of a follow-up and you will gain knowledge on how to advance your practice.
Building a strong bridge between expert patient acquisition and consistent patient retention is key to ensuring your practice grows year-over-year. Consider an EHR and PM system, stay consistent, stay quick and always make sure to follow up with your patients after an appointment.
Contributed by our valued partner, Red Spot Interactive
Closing the gap between patient acquisition and patient retention may sound difficult, which is why we have integrated our software with Azalea Health. Learn more about Red Spot Interactive at www.redspotinteractive.com.
