With focus on patient retention, healthcare businesses can experience long-term growth

Patient retention is a major issue that many medical practices struggle with. Low retention can not only mean increased patient acquisition costs but also threaten growth and revenue at a healthcare facility. Most healthcare businesses are facing the same challenges. They can’t keep their patients because they’re not doing enough for them. The good news is that there are steps you can take to help make sure your business stays afloat and grows over time.

Introduction

Most medical practices are experiencing the same challenges – patient retention, patient acquisition, profit margins, and improving patient experiences. In all likelihood, your business is experiencing the same challenges.

It’s no secret that patient retention has become a major obstacle for medical practices. The best way to ensure your practice stays afloat is by making sure patients have a positive experience and then staying in touch with them after their appointment so they can refer others to you if you’re doing something right!

Keeping your current patient base can be the most effective way to grow your business, so making sure you do everything you can to retain patients is a good investment for the future of your business. The best way to grow your healthcare business is by keeping and increasing the number of patients you already have because they’re the most valuable asset in the healthcare industry.

Create brand loyalty with your patients

Loyalty is an important part of business, especially when it comes to healthcare. When a patient is loyal, they will not only be more likely to fill their prescriptions on time, but they will also be more likely to stay with you as a client.

To create brand loyalty, there are three key things that you need:

1. A clear and consistent message about why you’re different from other companies in your industry. This can be done through the content of your website and marketing material such as email campaigns or social media posts. It’s important to establish this message early on so that you have a chance to get it across before any negative impressions start forming.

2. A commitment from all employees on how they will help ensure that patients are loyal to your company (whether through phone calls or email). The best way for this commitment to show up is simply by having people who care about their work show up every day and make sure that everyone else does too!

3. An understanding of what makes each patient unique so that you can design programs specifically for them—and tailor them so they feel like they were made just for them.

Build a strong patient base by offering them additional benefits and services that they value

The average patient stays in their primary care physician’s office for only two years, and it’s estimated that as many as half of patients who begin a health plan will drop out within a year.

But what if there were a way to keep patients from dropping out? What if you could offer them additional benefits and services—for free—that they value?

The answer can be a suite of services that you can offer to patients. These include access to an online portal where they can view their medical records and schedule appointments and a live chat feature that allows them to communicate with the doctor over video chat or phone calls.

Referral bonuses (bonus points for referring other patients)

Referrals are crucial when it comes down to growing long-term, but there are ways of encouraging referrals without making things feel forced or transactional. Offering points, gifts, and discounts to existing customers for referring new patients is one to incentivize referrals. Other options can be free consultations or tests with their doctors to incentivize their referrals.

Remind your patients how important they are

Paying attention to the needs of your patients can help you retain them. You want to show your patients that they are important. Remind them how valuable their business is to you. Thank them for their business and tell them how much it means to have them as customers. Give feedback on what they like or dislike about the experience, so that they know how valuable your opinion is.

Make your healthcare business stand out from the crowd

The healthcare industry is competitive, and it can be challenging to stand out from the crowd. However, by focusing on the customer experience and making sure that your office is clean and well-maintained, friendly, easy to get in/out of, etc., you’ll gain an edge over other businesses that might be offering similar services.

Patient engagement not only allows you to reach more patients but also allows you to improve patient retention. Patient engagement improvement is one of the easiest ways for healthcare providers to start distinguishing themselves from the competition.

Conclusion

We have learned a lot about how to retain patients and make sure that they stay with your healthcare business for the long term. The best way of doing this is by using all possible channels of communication to keep them informed and engaged in what you’re doing. However, if this doesn’t work then there are some more creative ideas out there that can help you do so while also playing on your emotions – like creating an emotional connection between yourself as a doctor or nurse and the patient at hand. This way they’ll feel like important customers who count on your services, making them want to come back again!

It’s no secret that patient retention is one of the most challenging aspects of running a medical practice. The healthcare industry has a long history of being slow to change, and even now it continues to rely on outdated processes and systems. As a result, many patients are leaving their practices for reasons unrelated to the quality of care—or at least that’s what you might think when reviewing their departure statistics.

However, there are ways for practices to improve their ability to retain patients so they can enjoy long-term growth instead of short-term success or failure.

BraveLabs is offering patient retention solutions that help healthcare providers to grow easily without spending excessively on bringing in new patients.