July 2019 Patient Mix

You likely calculate a payer mix for your practice, but have you calculated a patient mix?  How do you segregate your patients?  By age? By zip code?  Have you thought about bucketing your patients by how long it has been since their last visit?  This practice did just that.  By categorizing patients who had never been to the practice before, patients who had seen their provider in the past 30 days, the past 60 days, the past 90 days, or longer, you can gain insight into how patients flow to your practice and how they are retained.  Subscription services like Netflix always know how many subscribers they have.  It is harder for a medical practice to know how many patients are in the practice if some of those patients come infrequently.  Would you rather have a provider where most of the patients had been in the practice in the past 30 days or a provider with a higher percentage of new patients?  What is the right balance for your specialty and competitive environment?  Listen to today’s BIG Ideas podcast to think more about how to count, evaluate, and retain patients in your practice.