How often are your patients coming back? Does one treatment type generate more visits than another? Your frequent visitors are most likely going to be your best brand ambassadors, spreading the good word about your clinic. So it’s important to keep an eye on how often your patients are coming to your clinic and trying to improve the frequency.
How it’s Calculated:
Total number of appointments divided by the number of patients in a selected period of time, giving you the average amount of times you’ve seen the patient in the time period.
Useful for:
- Identifying Frequent Patients – Are they your highest performing patients?
- Repeat Appointments – If the number is low or starts to fall, it may indicate issues with your service. Has your customer service recently changed? Are Treatment Plans being used? Are patients being booked in for a new appointment while they’re in your clinic?
- Practitioner Performance – Are some of your practitioners better than others at ensuring patients are booked in for other appointments? Can you learn from these practitioners?
Further Insight:
- Treatment Plans – If Frequency is low, adopt Treatment plans to ensure return visits and increase Frequency and thereby revenue.
- Average Revenue per Patient – The frequency of visit needs to be aligned with the patient spend. Make sure your frequent visitors are not the ones making the most complaints and proving to be the most challenging. It’s often the case that you simply cannot meet the demands of some patients – frequent visitors – and its best for your clinic, if they seek an alternative provider.
- Treatment Type – Is Frequency a consequence of the Treatments you offer? Are patients returning less frequently because the effects of a treatment last a long time? Could you cross sell other treatments to encourage them to return more regularly?
Questions to ask yourself: