Keep Them Coming Back for More: Top 4 Ways to Re-engage Patients

// By Shawn McKee //

Does your practice have a plan to reactivate patients? Sometimes all it takes is the right nudge to get patients to come back. It’s worth a lot to your practice when they do.

Patient churn is an expected part of any provider’s practice. In fact, only 30 percent of physical therapy patients make it to the end of their treatment program before dropping out. As a result, practices may lose an average of $150,000 a year from patient dropout alone. While the numbers might be slightly different in other healthcare disciplines, the importance of re-engaging former patients remains the same. Reactivating former patients — either to continue where they left off or treat a new issue — is a lucrative source of potential revenue that practices can tap.

The COVID-19 pandemic brought great urgency to the question of how to win patients back. How does a clinic reconnect with its entire patient population after temporarily closing during the pandemic? How can it entice patients to re-engage?

Here are four strategies to build back up to pre-pandemic patient volumes.

1.   Include reactivation tactics in your overall strategy.

Marketing to get new patients is important to a clinic’s growth, but marketing to previous patients is a crucial and cost-effective way to increase revenues. Acquiring new patients is 10 times more expensive than reactivating existing patients. To capture this revenue, physical therapy clinics should have a reactivation plan in place. A robust and well-managed plan can drive hundreds of thousands of dollars in additional revenue for some clinics.

When revenues are down and margins are tight, reactivating patients should be a top priority for all health care organizations. Here are some best practices to win them back, and ideas for effective campaigns that convert.

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