How to Engage Inactive Patients

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

Most healthcare organizations have a number of inactive patients — those who haven’t come in for more than two years. And unfortunately, when a significant percentage of patients become inactive, your organization can suffer. While it’s possible to address this by focusing on new patient acquisition, taking steps to reactivate dormant patients and keep them engaged can often produce better outcomes for both the patient and your health system.

Developing a patient retention strategy

A patient retention plan can identify early warning signs and encourage your patients to return to your healthcare organization for as long as they require medical care. Understanding why certain patients become inactive can provide actionable insights into how you can keep them engaged in their care.

Developing an action plan to reduce the number of inactive patients is the final step. Before we can get there, we need to understand the importance of keeping patients engaged, how to identify inactive patients and at-risk patients, and why patients who stay with a single healthcare provider often have better outcomes.

The benefits of engaging inactive patients

Identifying and engaging inactive patients benefits everyone involved. It helps your health system stay afloat and it helps patients achieve better outcomes. On top of that, it costs less to retain an existing patient than to acquire a new one. This means that resources are being allocated optimally, rather than blowing the budget on less effective acquisition strategies.

Patients who consistently engage with the same provider experience decreased ED use, fewer hospitalizations, lower costs, and higher overall satisfaction.1 Note that retained patients also receive higher continuity of care. Among the Medicaid population, increased continuity of care is associated with a lower chance of readmission.1 For chronically ill patients, regular wellness visits can improve health outcomes and reduce the likelihood of preventable hospital admissions.¹

How to identify inactive patients

To determine how many inactive patients you have on file, you need to measure for patient retention. That means comparing the number of active patients (those who have come in within the past two years) against your total patient count from a particular year.

Say you want to determine how many new patients from 2015 are still active. You would take the number of new patients from that year and divide it against the number of patients from that same group that are still active today – that’s your retention rate.

For example, if you had 200 new patients in 2022, but only 100 of those have visited your office in the past 18 months, that would mean you have a 50% five-year retention rate. The average five-year retention rate for new patients is 43% according to WebMD Ignite data. This rate is derived from analysis of data from hundreds of healthcare organizations with varying patient populations and service line profiles, but it can serve as a useful point of reference.

Understanding patient dormancy

Once you have your baseline patient retention rate, you can use a dormancy model to distinguish between inactive patients and lost patients. Once you’ve identified dormant patients, you can take action to get them engaged, and hopefully bring them back into your care.

There are three levels of patient engagement:

1. Active. Patients who have had an encounter with your health system in the last two years.
2. Dormant. Patients who have not had an encounter in the last two years (but have in the last three).
3. Lost. Patients who have not engaged with your health system for over three years.

Another concept that can help explain inactive patient rates is churn. Churn describes the number of patients that become dormant in the two years following their most recent encounter with your health system.

Risks of Inactive Patients

To understand churn and the cause of inactive patients, we need to take a look at why patients don’t return. There are two main categories of risk for patient dormancy – risks related to recency, and risks related to patient circumstances.

Risks Related to Recency

The longer a patient goes without visiting your health system, the less likely they are to return. If a patient doesn’t return within a year or two of their first visit, their likelihood of returning is much lower.

Risks Related to Visit Type or Patient Circumstance

These risks include all of the broad categories of patient data, including:

1. Service category: This refers to the service line under which the visit occurs —. for example, obstetrics or trauma.
2. Visit type: This refers to the circumstances of the visit — for example, urgent, emergent, or preventive/wellness.
3. Demographics: The patient’s gender, age, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, etc.
4. Payer type: Whether the payer is commercial, Medicaid, or Medicare.

Each of these subcategories carries its own inherent risk of churn. For example, trauma patients have a lower than average retention rate which is to be expected because trauma is circumstantial and may not require ongoing care.

3 tactics to reduce patient churn and improve retention

Once you have your baseline retention rate, you can develop intelligent retention strategies to reduce patient churn. Here are three tactics to reduce inactive patients:

1. Use predictive modeling tools. Tools like dormancy models can be used to analyze data from thousands of patients and uncover the characteristics of patients who are most likely to churn.
2. Prioritize outreach early. Early outreach is beneficial for all patient cohorts, including those who are at higher risk of churning. An effective marketing strategy should target new patients with frequent, personalized material in order to build long-term relationships.
3. Micro-segment patients within specific cohorts. With predictive analytics, it’s possible to see what types of patients are most at risk of churning based on a few years of retention data. Then, you can launch specific marketing efforts to increase engagement with those micro-segments.

How WebMD Ignite can help

Taking a data-driven, analytics-based approach to patient dormancy can uncover insights and opportunities to enhance your patients’ outcomes and the organization’s economic viability. WebMD Ignite's predictive analytics solutions can help you jump-start your retention initiative. Visit our Analytics Solutions page to learn more and see how we can give you a competitive advantage.

WebMD Ignite's predictive analytics solutions can help you jump-start your retention initiative. Visit our Analytics Solutions page to learn more and see how we can give you a competitive advantage.

Sources

1.JAMA Network. Continuity of Care Matters in All Health Care Settings. https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2777855