Imagine this. 

You have a bucket that you want to fill all the way up with water, but there’s a hole in it and the water keeps leaking out. You have two options to fix this:

1. Add more water to the bucket
2. Patch up the hole

While adding more water to the bucket may seem easier, the water is still going to leak out of the bucket. It’s a quick fix, but not a solution as your bucket is never going to remain full. On the other hand, patching up the hole may take a bit more effort at first, but it solves your problem and you’ll be able to fill your bucket with water. 

It’s really a simple concept when you think about it, so let’s change it up a bit. Now, the bucket is your practice and the water is your patients. 

When it comes to your practice, it is so easy to think of growth as filling up your chairs with new patients. However, it’s also easy to let other patients slip out the backdoor if you’re focusing on the quick fix versus the solution.

So what would happen if you patched the hole in your practice? 

In short, your practice would grow faster that you could ever imagine because you’d be nurturing both old and new relationships. Not only would you be able to fill up your chairs with ease, you’d need to get more chairs to seat all of your patients, old and new. BUT this is only possible if you patch the hole in your practice.

To get to this point, you’ll need to focus inward on patient retention.

It seems counterproductive at first glance, but your practice’s growth depends on how well you can retain your patients. Not only is it logical, it’s economical. Amy Gallo of Harvard Business Review researched retention studies and discovered that it can be anywhere from 5 to 25 times more expensive to pull in a new customer than it is to retain a current customer. And for what? To potentially let them slip out the backdoor? 

With that, research done by Frederick Reichheld of Bain & Company shows that by simply increasing your customer retention rates by 5%, it can increase your profits anywhere from 25%-95%. 

Bottom line, patient retention is a game changer. 

To understand how to increase your patient retention rate, you’ll also need to be aware of what your patient churn rate is and how it directly relates to your patients.

Jill Avery, a senior lecturer at Harvard Business School, defines patient churn rate as “a metric that measures the percentage of [patients] who end their relationship with a [practice] in a particular period”. On the other hand, your patient retention rate is how many patients choose to stay with you in that same period of time. While both numbers essentially say the same thing on the surface, they offer each other a yin and yang effect when it comes to understanding your patients.

Your retention rate shows you what your patients like about your practice and what keeps them coming back, which is a nicer number to focus on. However, your churn rate helps you identify the holes in your practice as it shows what happened to allow your patients to leave the practice. This number hurts, but it’s also one of the best ways to honestly reflect on your practice and understand what stands between you and your growth.

What can Hi5 Practice do to help?

At Hi5 Practice, our main focus is to improve your communication with your existing patients. By nurturing the relationships you already have, we open the door to establishing long-lasting patients at your practice who will give those priceless word-of-mouth referrals and expand your practice for you.

We know how to communicate effectively to your patients because we are the patients. With our years of experience and constant analysis of our work, we’ve refined how to communicate to patients to create measurable results for years to come.

Let’s patch up the hole in your practice. We’ll bring the supplies, you bring the DDS.

Published Apr 16, 2021 2:03 CST