How To Develop Your Patient Retention Strategy?

Every healthcare practice has its own set of goals on delivering quality care, improving practice productivity and profitability. The most significant asset to achieve these three goals is your patients. What are patient retention rates? Many us the healthcare practices don’t know about what it is and how to improve patient retention rates for their practice. If you are one among them, this article is for you. Here we have enlisted the 6 best strategies to improve your patient retention rates efficiently.

6 Simple Steps To Improve Patient Retention Rates

1. Work Towards Your Patient Expectations

Give your patients something to look forward to is one of the best strategies to improve patient retention rates. In recent years, patient service has gone beyond attending to healthcare issues and complaints. You also need to meet and exceed their expectations. However, it is challenging to please someone you barely know. So, get to know your patients intimately. Understand what they want from your practice, and use these pointers to set expectations.

As you set and meet patient expectations, you are empowering them. According to experts, patients want to be enabled, not controlled. You have to act with empathy. One of the best ways to set and meet patient expectations is, to be honest when committing. This is where most medical practices fall flat. The majority of them make unrealistic promises to their patients. Be honest and straightforward about their health issues. If you do not achieve promised results within the stipulated time, do you know what will happen? You will fail as a brand.

Realizing that your patients’ satisfaction is key to retaining them will help you build a sustainable practice. Once patients are poorly treated, they will not forget the negative experiences for a very long time.

2. Build Patient Trust To Improve Patient Retention

Successful practices are built on trust. When a patient comes to your practice, and if there is no trust, the relationship dies. Seeing how important trust is to your practice, you have to consciously make attempts to promote trust. As you initiate a relationship with new and existing patients, you will have to allow them to trust you.

Ideally, when you are looking to build trust with your patients, use patient behavior data to deliver value with your services & improve your patient retention. That way, your patients will continually accept and appreciate your recommendations. The moment patients discover that you are not trustworthy, they will switch to your competitors.

3. Engage Your Patients With Automation Tools

Marketing automation refers to allowing some of your routine marketing tasks to be handled automatically by the software. Monitoring and keeping your patients updated manually is a time-consuming process. This is because there are so many processes to be repeated daily just to keep your practice fresh in the patient’s mind. Automation can set you at a faster pace than your competitors. The idea is to use automation to re-engage your patients and ultimately to improve patient retention rates for your healthcare practice. Automation can help you communicate stronger and faster with your target audience.

RELATED: 8 New Ways To Think About Healthcare Automation In 2021

Delivering excellent patient service and making it easy for patients to access vital information and support is critical. And this is one of the many reasons why you need to automate your marketing processes. For instance, Front Desk software can help you plot your patient persona, set up a marketing campaign, and collect vital patient data.

Through marketing automation, you can manage your patient contacts, send regular emails, schedule promotional newsletters and send text messages and appointment reminders. Standardizing your routine processes will enable you to deliver on the promises that you made to your patients. Regardless of how you look at it, marketing automation can help your practice in so many ways. A most important fact is it can help you engage and retain your patients.

4. Use Patient Portal To Improve Overall Care

The patient portal software is the number one tool for patient engagement in 2021. Patients are eager to understand their care and avoid health concerns if possible. Offering a patient portal will improve patient retention rates by giving your patients access to their medical history and up-to-date health information so they can stay in the loop.

It is also the quickest way to contact their physician should they have any questions. With quality software, physicians can quickly respond, improving patient trust and patient engagement to better their overall healthcare experience.

RELATED: #1 Guide: How To Build A Patient Portal Software?

5. Collecting Feedback From Your Patients Is A Good Choice

If patients aren’t pleased with their visit, there’s a good chance they’ll take their business to another provider. Sending patient satisfaction surveys after every visit is a great way to gain valuable feedback that can improve your reputation. Use the responses to learn what you’re doing well and where there’s room for improvement.

Giving people a voice makes them feel empowered. One of the best patient retention strategies, this is an easy way to open the lines of communication and promptly address issues that might otherwise cause them to head to another practice.

6. Educate Your Patients Via Online Platforms

Engage patients outside the office by launching a robust marketing strategy. Start a blog where you can provide education on topics important to your patient base, while showcasing your expertise, and this creates a chance to improve your patient retention rates.

Establish a social media presence, and publish a steady stream of content to connect with patients. Hearing from you regularly will keep your practice on their mind, and could even serve as a reminder to book preventative screenings that might otherwise be forgotten.

Ready To Improve Your Patient Retention Rates?

Improving patient retention rates is very crucial and it is achievable only with the help of the right software. Learn how experts at Vozo can help your practice improve patient retention rates with the best EHR and patient portal software. Contact us to learn more about our software features and plans.