How to Increase Your Patient’s Lifetime Value (LTV)

Your patients are your most valuable asset, and their lifetime value (LTV) is crucial to the success of your practice. By expanding your practice and increasing your patients’ LTV, you can ensure a bright future for your business. 

What Is Patient Lifetime Value (LTV)?

Patient lifetime value (LTV) is a metric used to determine the value of a patient to a healthcare organization. Essentially, it's the sum of all future cash flows until the end of the relationship or their life.

The metric can be calculated in two different ways:

1) When the healthcare organization assumes that each patient will generate equal revenue over their lifetime

2) When the healthcare organization assumes that each patient will generate different levels of revenue over their lifetime

Why Is Patient Lifetime Value Important?

The concept of patient LTV is a simple but powerful one. It’s the idea that every dollar you spend on your patients upfront has the potential to generate more revenue down the line.

Calculating patient LTV is essential because it helps healthcare companies understand their patient population and the best way to engage them.

The total revenue generated from patients over their lifetime can help healthcare companies understand their patient population and the best way to engage them.

Proven Ways to Increase Your Patient Lifetime Value

Patient LTV is determined by several factors, including the number of times they visit, the services they use, and their likelihood of referring others to the practice.

By providing high-quality care and continually working to improve the patient experience, you can keep your patients coming back for years to come. Here are some effective strategies to increase your patients' LTV:

Offer Incentives

Provide Incentives for Staying with Your Practice

Offering incentives for staying with your practice is a proven way to increase your patient lifetime value. For example, you may offer patients that have been with you for a long time a free consultation or exam. You could also offer them discounts on products or services they’ll need in the future.

You can also present incentives not directly related to your practice's service offerings, such as gift cards. Patients may enjoy being able to earn points or redeem them for prizes like spa treatments or restaurant vouchers. 

You can give out free T-shirts or a chance to win an iPad each time they come in for a consultation. You can also add small tokens or gifts on patients’ birthdays or on holidays.

Provide Incentives for Referrals

Referral incentives are a proven way to increase your patient lifetime value. These incentives can be in the form of cash or other benefits, such as free services or discounts.

Referral programs are an effective tool for increasing customer retention and acquisition efforts and can be implemented in many different ways depending on the type of business and its goals. 

Ask your patients if they would like to refer their friends and family members. Provide them with a referral card or a link where they can enter their contacts' email addresses, phone numbers, or social media handles. You can also place a "refer a patient" call-to-action button on your website and ask for referrals when interacting with patients.

Foster a Positive Patient Experience

The key to maximizing your patients’ LTV is to make them happy. To make sure that you’re doing everything you can to keep patients coming back, you must consistently do the following:

• Streamline your communications and provide exceptional customer service
• Provide a superior patient experience at every interaction
• Offer patients with convenient access to care
• Simplify your billing and collections process
• Reduce the time spent on hold in calls
• Increase follow-up contact
• Implement a patient portal

You can quickly achieve these by investing in a cloud-based phone system. That brings us to the next section.

How Cloud-Based Phone Systems Help Increase Your Patient Lifetime Value

The increase in the adoption of cloud-based phone systems has led to a corresponding increase in the number of businesses looking to increase their customer lifetime value. 

To maximize revenue, businesses need to keep their customers around for as long as possible, and cloud-based phone systems can help with that. As with your own practice, the features and flexibility offered by these systems can help keep your patients happy and engaged, which can lead to longer customer retention.

These are some of the advantages of using cloud-based systems for increasing patient LTV:

Enhances Patient Communication

Patient communication is key to any medical practice. Cloud-based phone systems help make it easier for patients to communicate with their care providers. It also helps make the process more efficient.

Patients are always looking for a new way to reach out and contact their care provider. They’re looking for ways to feel connected and take an active role in their care. With cloud-based phone systems, they can do just that.

By using a cloud-based phone system, your medical staff can better keep in touch with your patients and provide them with timely information about their health. This can lead to increased patient satisfaction and loyalty.

Moreover, a cloud-hosted phone system has rich features traditional phones can’t match. It provides much more than just voice communication. It includes video chat, text chat, and other options which allow you to communicate with your patients in different ways that they prefer.

It makes communication faster and more convenient. Cloud-based phones can also work with interactive voice response (IVR) menus to give your staff the ability to handle calls from patients more quickly and easily. You can even automate the process of reminding patients about their upcoming appointments via SMS.

Frees up Staff Time to Focus on Core Tasks

By automating repetitive processes and tasks, you can improve your customer service and free up your staff to provide a more personalized experience to your patients. Naturally, this can result in increased patient LTV.

Comes with Reliable 24/7 Support

A cloud-based phone system is one of the best investments a medical clinic can make because it provides reliable 24/7 support to your clinic staff.

With a full-stack digital phone system, you and your staff will have 24/7 access to a dedicated account manager who can solve any problem that may arise. Whether you need help setting up your system or troubleshooting an issue, these experts are available at any time to answer questions and guide you through the process.

All of these translate to better customer service and increased patient satisfaction.

Offers More Stable and Better Call Quality

Poor call quality is off-putting to patients. A cloud-based phone system offers better call quality and increased stability than an on-premises phone system. They’re not tied to one location, which means that they can be up and running at all times. 

This also means there‘s no need for onsite maintenance, which can often lead to downtime and poor call quality. 

Cloud-based phones offer better call quality with redundant infrastructure and power supply, ensuring calls will always be clear and consistent.

Boost Patient LTV with a Cloud-Based Phone System Made for Healthcare

No matter the industry, you rely on your customer retention to drive your business. But trying to retain customers with a phone system that's outdated and unreliable can do more harm than good.

A cloud-based phone system specially designed for healthcare not only gives you the flexibility to offer your patients the service they need and deserve, but also helps you retain patients and generate new patient referral opportunities. 

By replacing your old phone system with a new cloud-based one, you'll increase your patient retention rate and grow your profits effortlessly.