4 Reasons Why Relationship-Building is Essential for Patient Retention

Editor's Note: This blog was published prior to the transition to WebMD Ignite.

Doctors and care providers across the healthcare continuum understand the impact a good rapport with patients has on their ability to provide superior medical care. A strong patient-provider relationship facilitates cooperation and provides greater opportunities to learn about a patient’s unique health needs. This enables providers to better connect patients with the treatments and resources to improve overall health. 

At an organizational level, building and maintaining strong relationships is just as important, now more than ever. 

Think of it this way, modern healthcare consumers are experiencing higher premiums, deductibles, and copays. As a result, they’ve taken it upon themselves to ensure the healthcare systems they use provide the greatest value for their money. Consumers are researching competitive pricing, overall care quality, and customer service in order to choose the healthcare organizations that balance price and value. 

Given the fact that it costs five times more to attract a new customer than to retain an existing one, it’s becoming increasingly important that organizations focus on patient retention. By building relationships with patients across the healthcare system, organizations can identify opportunities to provide greater value throughout the patient’s healthcare journey, helping create patients for life. 

With this in mind, we will explore four reasons why relationship management is an essential part of effective patient retention:

Improved health outcomes

All health organizations know, the most important piece of providing health services is the overall health outcomes of your members and patients. By implementing innovative solutions for better provider-patient relationships, your organization can foster quality patient journeys, resulting in improved health outcomes for your communities. 

Through effective communication and thoughtful relationship management strategies, health organizations can incentivize patients to stay within their health system, which results in better overall health outcomes. Keeping loyal patients within your network cuts down on miscommunications, and saves time and resources when it comes to scheduling appointments, getting referrals, and accessing health records.

Attracting best-in-class HCPs

Quality healthcare providers (HCPs) are an essential part of operating an effective healthcare organization. Having your clinical experience set up for success, with easy-to-use resources for managing patient relationships, is one way to distinguish yourself from other healthcare systems and attract top providers to your system.

Having proper relationship management strategies in place takes some of the clinical load off your providers, and allows them to focus on providing in-person care to your patient population. By integrating useful clinical and platform solutions, patient relationship management can be automated, allowing HCPs to focus on what they do best. 

Brand reputation management 

In this modern age, brand is everything. If your organization consistently maintains satisfying relationships with health consumers, this will be reflected both online and through word-of-mouth, making brand reputation management simple. 

Ensuring that your health consumers and patients are happy with their overall experience is a foundational part of building a successful brand reputation management strategy, which in turn fuels patient retention as well as patient acquisition. 

Decreased costs

Efficient relationship building can help cut clinical and platform costs, which in turn allows health organizations to keep costs low for patients and members. While quality of care is the ultimate deciding factor when it comes to patient retention, your patient population has to be able to afford your services in order to stay within your system.  By staying on top of relationship management and improving patient retention, your organization can focus on spending time, resources, and money on improving your patient experience in other areas.