Make a New Year’s Resolution to Improve Patient Retention
January 17, 2012 – 10:44 amEveryone knows that taking steps to retain existing patients is more cost-effective than engaging in marketing activities to attract new ones. Once you have loyal patients in your practice, to keep them, you typically need only to meet their expectation of delivering quality care and providing efficient, friendly service. Sounds simple, right? It is. But in too many instances, patients transfer their care to other practitioners because they feel that their most basic needs are not being met. Here are three areas to focus on this year if one of your practice resolutions is to retain the patients you have.
Make your practice accessible. If patients consistently have to wait days to be seen for an acute problem or weeks (if not months) to get on the schedule for a non-emergent issue, you are at risk of losing patients to a practice that has openings within a more reasonable time frame. We live in a world of instant everything. Even though, most likely, no harm will come from a patient waiting a couple of weeks to have a suspiciouslooking mole checked out, if you’re that patient and anxious about the mole, every day of waiting matters. Read the rest of this entry »


