Do you know what your annual patient attrition rate is? No? Don’t worry—you’re not alone. Patient attrition is the difference between the number of patients with an appointment since you opened your clinic and your total active patients. The average patient attrition rate in the United States is 17 percent. Let’s put this in simple terms. If your clinic has a patient base of 2,000 active patients, then every year roughly 340 patients will stop visiting your practice. In order to keep increasing your revenue and growing your practice, you have to know to how to increase patient retention and make up for the lost patients.
How much is your practice focusing on acquiring new patients vs retaining your existing patients
It is six to seven times more expensive to acquire a new customer than it is to retain an existing one. (Think existing patient vs. new patient.) Attracting new patients are incredibly important, but improving chiropractic patient retention can mean far more profitability over the life of your business.
How? Let’s do some basic calculations on how much a patient brings to your clinic. You can find it by knowing the lifetime value of a patient. The lifetime value of a single patient is an estimation of the net profit that the entire future relationship with the patient can generate.
Lifetime Value = V x N x Y
where,
V = Average Value of Appointment
N = Average Number of Appointments Each Year
Y = Average Number of Years They Visit Your Practice
A study found that the average number of visits for chiropractic care is 6.7 per year. The average fee to see a chiropractor is approximately $65 per visit.
Let’s say, for example, your average patient makes 7 appointments a year, worth $65 each, and stays with your practice for an average of 5 years, then the average lifetime value of your patient would be 7 x $65 x 5 = $2275.
Considering the average lifetime value of a patient and the number of patients lost through attrition, a clinic might lose hundreds of thousands of dollars in a year. This is not good. But what can you do to get new chiropractic patients? How to increase the patient retention rate? As a chiropractor, you can keep the lifetime value high with a chiropractic patient retention strategy.
This blog breaks down chiropractic patient retention strategies into two main categories. Building retention through your clinic and staff and patient experience.
Before we head into the strategies on how to increase patient retention, let’s check out why patients leave a chiropractic clinic.
Patients leave a clinic for a variety of reasons, including:
- Poor experience with a provider and staff
- Slow or no response to questions or concerns
- Poor communication and long waiting times
- Delayed access to the next available appointment
- Poor billing experience
15 Patient Retention Strategies for your Chiropractic Clinic
How to get new chiropractic patients? This is one of the challenges chiropractors are facig today. A patient retention is a key driver of success and financial rewards in the chiropractic industry. When chiropractic providers prioritize patient retention and focus on delivering excellent clinical outcomes, several positive outcomes follow, such as more word-of-mouth referrals, cost savings, enhanced reputation, and increased revenue. Let’s check out two ways to build a solid patient retention strategy.
A: Building retention through your clinic and administration
1. Make appointment scheduling a breeze
Make sure your clinic is using appointment scheduling software that allows your patients to book appointments online via your website or social media, 24/7. It should only take a couple of minutes for patients to get their appointment on your calendar. Patients are now accustomed to convenient online options. Once they find the most convenient option to book appointments with your clinic, they will continue visiting your practice. So providing online booking option is just one way to increase patient retention.
2. Send appointment confirmations and reminders
Here is the second one. There is a link between patient retention and communication. Sending automated email appointment confirmations is good office and calendar administration, and equally important as it lets patients know that you value them. Text and email reminders sent a day or two before the appointment day can help minimize no-shows and show patients that you respect their schedule.
3. Have a professional, online presence
Your website is a good source for patient retention as it can provide a place for patients to book appointments with one click and get important information between visits. Having a website also makes new patients feel comfortable making that first appointment.
Make sure you have updated Google My Business and Bing listings. When existing patients will search for your clinic, your Google and Bing business listings will come up quickly on search results. They can visit your site for updated information or click on the “Book an Appointment” button to schedule their next visit.
Online presence is not complete without having a social media presence. Leverage social media channels like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter to interact with your patients and show that you are more than just a building with chiropractic services.
4. Have friendly, trained, and communicative staff
Provide the best in-office experiences to boost your patient retention rates. Sometimes, poor interactions with staff can affect the relationship you have with your patients. It can cause even the most loyal patients to leave. Train your staff to be communicative, professional, and friendly when attending to patients.
5. Manage your online reputation
a. Optimize Your Google My Business Listing
When prospective new patients perform a local search for a chiropractor (as opposed to doing research on say, back pain), Google includes a map of providers in close proximity.
Making sure your practice shows up in the maps section is essential since it is displayed above the organic search results. Among other things, having your practice show up in the maps section requires:
– That your practice profile is complete.
– That your practice is close to the searcher.
– That your practice is open for business.
This requires signing into your Google account and completing every question with the required information. Be sure to upload relevant photographs of you and your practice. Perhaps even more important is having as many positive, five-star reviews as possible. Getting positive reviews the proper way is covered here, as is what to do if you receive a negative review. The importance of positive reviews cannot be overplayed.
Keep your online reputation positive is the most effective patient retention strategy. How to get started with this? The best way to do this is to use patient retention solutions, such as online review automation solution.
Automating the review management process can help you save a lot of time and hassles. zHealth helps you automatically collect, post, and monitor reviews on Google, Yelp, and Facebook. These reviews can be some of the best marketing tactics for your business. Also, thank all patients for the positive feedback and immediately address any negative responses.
6. Minimize long wait times
How to get more chiropractic patients? Minimize long wait times. A long wait time in the waiting room can hurt your patient retention efforts. The shorter the wait time is, the happier your patients will be. They will kep coming back because they are happy with your services.
Use a chiropractic appointment scheduling system and automatic reminders to keep everyone on time and run your clinic more efficiently.
7. Maintain a flawless billing process
Quality care starts with appointment setting and ends with collecting billed payments. It’s not just the visit that must be perfect. Billing inefficiencies, such as overcharging a patient, or misinformation about insurance coverage, could lead to unhappy patients.
Have a proper billing and payment procedure set up at check-in or check-out and be clear in your communications. Use chiropractic billing software so your staff won’t make billing mistakes. Most mistakes occur due to technical issues or staff entering incorrect diagnostic codes into bills. A flawless billing process will show your patients that you don’t just provide chiropractic care but also care about the amount they pay and how they pay it.
B. Building retention through good patient experience
8. Offer digital intake
Patients are now accustomed to sleek digital and self-service experiences in industries such as retail, travel, and banking. They don’t like to fill out time-consuming, repetitive, and tedious intake forms before accessing services. In short, paper-based intake paperwork do nothing to win patient loyalty. Offer what patients want – they want digital intake technology.
A digital intake tool allows patients to fill out intake forms from the comfort of their homes using any mobile device. Once a patient fills in the forms, the intake data makes its way into the chiropractic EHR software in time for the appointment, saving time for you and your staff as well.
9. Educate and inform patients
The world of chiropractic care can be overwhelming for many patients. Insurance, copays, chiropractic terminology, and new chiropractic procedures can lead to confused patients. That’s why patient retention and communication go hand in hand. Do your best to educate and inform patients about everything. This can include anything from your practice’s accepted insurances, educational videos on chiropractic exercises, treatment regimens, how many visits are required to help them improve their condition, or anything that they should know when engaging with your clinic.
Educational videos, text messages to let them know about your office hours or address, informative email campaigns, communicative staff, and a user-friendly website can all help your patients feel informed, educated, and comfortable with their visits. zHealth’s patient retention solutions help you educate and inform your patients with just a click. Use 2-way text messaging or send emails to patients with health resources and educational materials.
10. Offer in-house membership plans
The traditional model of chiropractic service delivery is pay-per-visit. However, patients have grown frustrated with the rising costs of their health insurance responsibilities. Membership plans give patients a clearly defined and affordable monthly payment option for their chiropractic care. Not only is it great for attracting new patients, but it provides the type of “sticky” solution that significantly improves the patient experience and retention.
Membership subscriptions can be the best solution for insured patients with high deductible health insurance plans, patients with no insurance coverage, or patients with insurance plans that don’t cover chiropractic services. A little focused effort, good membership packages, and a membership management tool can help your practice go a long way.
11. Remember birthdays and holidays
Everyone loves their birthday. Celebrate with your patients by sending out a personalized text message. This can mean a lot to patients. Just like birthdays – feel free to send out greetings for major holidays. You might want to consider a patient retention solution for sending text messages to patients on special occasions.
zHealth provides two-way texting and patient retention software that can help you send text messages on birthdays and holidays, enhancing your patient relationships.
12. Always communicate the way patients want
Strengthening the provider-patient connection can support your practice retention strategy. One simple tactic is to communicate with patients in ways they prefer. Patients prefer appointment reminders via text messages and emails. However, when patients have a question for you or your staff, many patients prefer two-way text messaging.
To take retention communication one step further, chiropractic clinics can implement automated email campaigns to send educational videos and materials so that patients feel engaged in between visits and keep coming back.
13. Offer digital payment options
More than half of consumers say the pandemic affected how they pay for healthcare. A good strategy on how to improve patient retention is make everything frictionless for patients, including paying for their visits.
Contactless payments, mobile wallets, and online bill payments have become popular choices. Offer your patients a seamless payment experience. Give them the ability to receive invoices quickly and digitally, and pay them in the same manner. For improving patient retention, take the focus off the patient’s payments process and onto their care instead.
[You may like to read: Reimagining Chiropractic Patient Experience: Going ‘Contactless’ In The ‘Untact’ Era]
14. Offer modern conveniences wherever you can
Today, patients are accustomed to technology and now expect immediate, personalized care at their fingertips. Digital convenience is a significant determining factor when patients consider their healthcare options. There are steps you can take to add convenience to the patient journey.
Your clinic should automate clinic processes and optimize patient touchpoints. Make sure all chiropractic software and solutions you are using for practice automation are integrated and provide seamless online experiences. If you’re still thinking – “how to improve patient retention?” – then it’s time to automate your practice and give more time to patients.
Take advantage of telehealth, patient reactivation tools, 2-way text messaging, a review automation system, and other new technology you can integrate into your clinic operations.
15. Reactivate drop-off patients
How to get more chiropractic patients? Take the extra step of connecting with patients who have missed an appointment or were expected to visit your clinic. A simple recall reminder may be all that’s needed and is usually appreciated by patients.
zHealth Patient Plus helps you do exactly that, but everything is automated. The software identifies patients who have not visited your practice for more than 3, 6, or 12 months and sends them a reminder. Patients can easily book an appointment through text reminders and comes back to your clinic for follow-ups.
Attain Success through Effective Retention Systems
Visualize your version of success and recognize that improving patient retention relies significantly on implementing a robust strategy. Cultivating patient loyalty through a successful patient journey is the key to successful retention. To foster patient loyalty, it is crucial to prioritize patient experience and streamline administrative processes. Using purpose-built chiropractic software systems designed to achieve each goal is essential. Embracing advanced technology will contribute to improved patient retention and propel your path to success.
Final thoughts
Practices that engage in retention strategies are more likely to benefit from patient loyalty, resulting in a higher patient retention rate. Remember, patient retention is all about providing excellent service at every step of the way, starting from helping them find your business online easily, booking an appointment to paying for services.
Invest in chiropractic software with integrated scheduling, billing, payments, reminders, and messaging solutions that help make patients feel special and not just “one of many”. With the aforementioned patient retention ideas and zHealth chiropractic software by your side, you can deliver world-class patient experiences that improve patient loyalty and drive retention. Want to learn how zHealth chiropractic software can help you improve your patient retention? Talk to one of our experts to learn more.
