Patient demand of the healthcare sector is increasing, therefore patient acquisition is key to growing any medical practice. Calculating your cost per lead and cost per appointment are smart marketing decisions, but you’ll also need to calculate the return side. Calculating the return on investment (ROI) requires figuring out the lifetime value (LTV) of your patients.

Lifetime value is crucial to medical practices because it allows healthcare providers to narrow down their focus on specific customers and gives insight into how profitable their office really is. Tracking your lifetime value also helps you predict how well your practice will do in the future — providing insight into a possible growing issue and how you may be able to address it before it threatens your practice. On the other hand, if your LTV is growing with a steady marketing investment, this signals that your marketing efforts are doing well, and you can stick to your current strategy.

Calculating the lifetime value of your patients

The calculation for LTV is the average value of an appointment multiplied by the average appointments per year multiplied by the average number of years a patient visits your practice. 

Here is the equation below:

Lifetime Value = V x N x Y

V = Average Value of Appointment

N = Average Number of Appointments Each Year

Y = Average Number of Years They Visit Your Practice

For example: if you run an ENT practice and your average patient makes 3 appointments per year, worth $150 each and stays with your practice an average of 6 years, then the average lifetime value of your patients would be 3 x $150 x 6 = $2,700. 

Keeping your lifetime value high 

Patient retention is key to keeping your lifetime value high. This can be done by welcoming patient feedback, sending out appointment or follow-up reminders, and creating a positive relationship with your patients. You may also want to draw in new patients. This requires utilizing SEO-friendly healthcare content marketing, targeting and engaging the right patient at the right time, and providing easy access to care and information.

Leveraging the patient journey is a crucial component of engagement. You want to deliver the right information at the right time throughout the patient’s journey. LEVO Health’s shared decision-making (SDM) model is significantly more likely to gain the trust and engagement of patients. Better patient experience leads to more patients, which means more revenue, saving the provider money, and increasing patient lifetime value.

Sending out appointment or follow-up reminders will help your patients stay on top of their health. Chances are that they’ve forgotten about an appointment at least once, or perhaps had to reschedule. Either way, appointment and follow-up reminders can vastly improve your practice’s efficiency and enhance the patient experience. 

Contact Us

Interested in hiring a professional marketing team to help grow your practice and optimize the patient experience? Contact the healthcare marketing experts at LEVO Health today by calling 855-234-0232 or visiting our contact page online.