Marketing Matters

Assessing Patient Retention

by Melissa Neill

Health-related businesses generally thrive by acquiring new patients and retaining current ones. Eyecare providers and retailers are no exception. All too often, efforts are directed at generating new inquiries that convert to new patients.

However, focusing on current patients and understanding their needs is just as important—they can be advocates for your business and provide a steady stream of income.

Where is the best place to start? A survey of current and lapsed patients is a great way to see why some patients stay and why others move to another provider. What follows is a simple process for assessing and addressing patient retention for your business.

GETTING READY

Start with an internal brainstorming meeting, including all individuals with a patient touch point: doctors, receptionists, and even accounting or billing representatives. Keeping this group small will help to move decisions along. For an objective perspective, consider an outside resource to lead the session.

This session is a conversation about current patient retention efforts, types of patient communication, goals for retaining patients, and desired outcomes of a survey. Things to talk about include:

1. Perception: How do we believe patients perceive us?
2. Communication: How well do we communicate with our patients? What kind of communication do we use? How often do we communicate between appointments?
3. Patient experience: What is the patient experience like?
4. Retention: What is our patient retention status? What are our goals for patient retention?
5. Goals: What information will we gather fro m a survey?
6. Applications: How will this information work to help us retain patients? How will we use this information?

This is not an exhaustive list, but will help guide an initial discussion.

Following this discussion, review current and past efforts to retain patients.

Look at patient communication pieces, including newsletters, appointment reminder voicemails, emails or cards, and review industry and competitive patient retention practices to help with question development (i.e., does this particular communication piece serve its purpose?).

CREATE THE SURVEY LIST

The next step is creating the survey. To start, look at your current and lapsed list of patients. If your practice is small, survey everyone. For a larger practice, the list should consist of enough participants to make data representative of current patients.

Look at the size of your practice and isolate what you believe is a sufficient number of patients to survey. Not all patients are willing to participate, so a larger list than the target number of respondents is important.

Next, develop the questions. Each question should help gather information to accomplish the initial survey objective. For more about creating questions, see the box to the right.

LAUNCH THE SURVEY

How a survey is conducted depends on available information. Do you have email addresses, or just phone numbers? Both methods have advantages and disadvantages.

• Online. While the primary advantage of conducting surveys online is the relatively low cost for the quantity, some consider another advantage to be that it is less intrusive and respondents can complete the survey at their convenience.
  Don't let this be an excuse to leave the survey active for months. A safe time limit is two weeks. A friendly second reminder after the first week will always encourage additional responses.
• Phone. Telephone is typically a more expensive option, but it lets interviewers gather more in-depth information. This type of outsourced survey can cost upwards of $25,000 to capture 100 patient interviews. Don't underestimate the time required for phone surveys. Finding willing participants can take weeks or months.
• Resources. For each method, there are several resources available, all with different costs. Survey Monkey and Zoomerang offer free basic versions and are often used by survey experts.
  Several market research firms offer telephone and online services for a fee. The intent of the survey should help guide the number of participants as well as the method used.

REVIEW THE RESULTS

Following a survey, the most important aspect is review. Look for trends in information to determine the effectiveness of patient retention efforts. Then, use insights to determine next steps: How information will be used to enhance patient communication and experience.

Most important to note, though, is that a survey is not done once, used for a period of time to determine necessary improvements, and then forgotten. To be effective, insights need to be measured on a regular basis to determine changes in attitudes and behavior.

If your organization has never done a patient survey before, the first survey will be a starting point. Depending on budget, resources, and usage, surveys should be conducted every one to five years. Just remember not to significantly change the questions. Keeping them consistent will allow you to see the changes in attitudes over time. EB

Melissa Neill is an account supervisor at Risdall McKinney Public Relations, an integrated public relations firm in the Twin Cities. Visit the firm's website at: www.risdallmckinneypr.com.