What is patient retention rate?
Patient retention rate is the share of a clinic's existing patients who return within a given period, usually a year. Divide the number of patients seen in the period who had also been seen before it by the total number of patients who existed at the start, then multiply by a hundred.
The calculation
Take a period, most commonly twelve months. Count the patients on the register at the start of it. Then count how many of those same patients attended at least once during it. Divide the second by the first and multiply by a hundred.
New patients acquired during the period are excluded on purpose. Including them measures growth, not retention, and a clinic growing quickly can post a healthy-looking number while losing most of its existing base.
What counts as returning depends on the specialty
Twelve months is the usual window because it matches how often most patients would be expected back. For a course-based practice, such as physiotherapy or aesthetic dermatology, a course abandoned halfway is a retention failure even though the patient attended recently.
The right window is the one after which a given specialty would consider a patient lapsed, which is a clinical judgement rather than an accounting one.
Why the number is almost never known
Calculating it requires a list of patients with no visit in the window, and most practices have never produced one. Where records are on paper, or split across a register and a calendar, the list cannot be produced at all without going through the books by hand.
The consequence is that estimates from inside the same practice, and from neighbouring practices in the same specialty, can differ enormously. They are impressions, not measurements.
Questions doctors ask
- What is a good patient retention rate for a clinic?
- Benchmarks vary so much by specialty that a single target is misleading. A paediatric practice on a fixed immunisation schedule should retain far more than an aesthetic clinic selling one-off courses. The useful comparison is a clinic against its own number over time, not against an industry figure.
- How do I calculate retention if my records are on paper?
- Go through the register for the period and mark every patient who appears in it and also appeared earlier. Tedious but entirely possible, and usually revealing. Most clinics that do this once are surprised enough by the result to do it again.
- Is retention rate the same as churn?
- They are complements. If retention is seventy percent over a year, churn is thirty. Retention is the more natural framing for clinics because it counts the patients still coming, which is the base the practice actually earns from.