As a healthcare provider, your number one priority is providing excellent dental care. However, ensuring profitability is also a crucial part of running a dental practice. 

One of the best ways to measure the success of your business and discover insights that help you improve it is by learning how to calculate patient retention rate for your dental clinic. Patient retention rate refers to the percentage of customers you keep within a specific time period. 

If you notice your patient retention rate is on a downward spiral, it’s time to develop strategies to improve patient satisfaction so your existing customers want to stick around. 

With Dental Intelligence Patient Loyalty Program, you can effectively retain patients by rewarding them for different actions they complete with your practice. Sign up today to find out how you can start rewarding patients for choosing you as their dental care provider.

Why Is Patient Retention So Important?

Businesses have to spend a significant amount of money on customer acquisition, whether they’re paying for advertising or marketing staff. The price of bringing in a constant flow of new patients is much greater than the price of keeping patients, so the most cost-effective strategy is to focus on keeping your patient retention rate as high as possible.

If you can increase your patient retention rate, even by just a few percentage points, you’ll drastically increase your practice’s revenue due to the high value of a loyal customer base. When you have an outstanding customer experience that keeps patients coming back, you earn more referrals and attract more new patients.

Why Do Patients Leave Behind Dental Practices?

Along with your patient retention rate, you should also learn how to calculate your patient attrition rate, which lets you know how many patients you lose in a year. Generally, you can consider a patient lost if they haven’t scheduled an appointment in over 18 months. 

Measuring your patient attrition helps you recognize when your dental practice needs to improve patient satisfaction. Patients move on from dental practices for many reasons, including the following:

• Bad experiences with a dentist or other staff members
• Slow responses or lack of communication
• Long waits in the office and on the phone
• Lack of availability for immediate appointments

Taking into account the most prevalent reasons for losing patients, you can start incorporating changes that improve your practice’s patient communication, appointment scheduling, and wait times. 

For example, you might choose an effective practice performance solution that provides features to streamline your services, such as Online Scheduling, 2-Way Communication, and Virtual Check-In.

How to Calculate Patient Retention Rate for Your Dental Practice

The first step is to choose a specific period of time you want to measure the patient retention rate for, whether it’s the past year, six months, or two weeks. Typically, you’ll have a start date and an end date, and you’ll be looking at your patient numbers within this period.

You’ll need to know the number of patients you had on the start date, how many new patients you acquired during the period, and the number of patients you had on the end date. 

Before we get to the formula, we need to define our variables:

• S = number of patients at the start of the period
• E = number of patients at the end of the period
• N = number of new patients gained within the period

Using your practice data, replace the variables with the appropriate numbers in the formula below:

Patient retention rate = ((E - N) / S) x 100

The answer is your patient retention rate for the period of time you chose to analyze. When you use this calculation over multiple periods, such as every year or two years, you’ll start to see a pattern that tells you how well your retention strategies are working. 

These ongoing insights help you make adjustments to manage your retention rate. Customer loyalty is valuable in terms of business profits, but it also enhances the overall patient experience, leading to better treatment outcomes and improving the satisfaction of your dental team. 

Boost Your Dental Practice’s Patient Retention Rate

With Dental Intelligence, you get access to easy-to-use dental software that provides you with tools to keep an eye on your practice performance. Using the data you already have, our software provides a helpful overview that you can easily share with your staff. 

You now know how to calculate patient retention rate, so your next step is to learn the top patient retention strategies from our blog. Schedule a demo today to start practicing smarter.