As healthcare costs climb and patients expect more personalized care, systems can’t afford to lose patients to disengagement. A data-driven retention strategy helps organizations understand why patients drop off—and how to re-engage them at every step of the care journey.
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The healthcare industry is bracing for steep challenges ahead—from market disruptions to the growing cost of patient retention. As systems confront tighter margins and shifting expectations, stemming patient leakage is emerging as a critical survival strategy.
Revenue is expected to shrink due to macroeconomic pressures affecting the total insured population, changes in reimbursement, and the cost of capital required to invest in growth. As a result, competition is increasing. Retaining existing patients is a crucial first step in minimizing revenue loss and managing expenses. It’s cheaper to keep a patient than to acquire a new one.
Further, the competitive landscape has shifted. Health systems aren’t just competing with the organization down the street anymore; they’re vying against every other demand on a consumer’s time, attention, and discretionary dollars, amid rising inflation and financial strain.
To compete, health systems must offer a differentiated consumer experience—from digital communication to in-person care—that captures attention, earns trust, and inspires loyalty. The shift from viewing patients solely as patients to understanding them as empowered consumers is no longer theoretical but a strategic necessity.
Beyond financial pressures driving an increasing need to prioritize patient retention, societal forces are also at play. For instance, young people are getting diagnosed with cancer at an alarming rate. As more patients require timely, coordinated care, the healthcare system is becoming more complex, and issues like insurer hurdles, limited payer guidance, and fragmented provider networks make it harder to navigate.
This complex environment often results in inconsistent follow-up appointments and delayed treatments. Care falls through the cracks, conditions worsen, and missed referrals become avoidable hospitalizations. This breakdown isn’t just a patient experience improvement problem; it’s a major driver of disease progression and rising costs.
The business of healthcare is innately human and personal. The following story grounds this idea into something tangible.
Primary care physicians at a large healthcare organization (“System A”) recommended a patient undergo testing for a concerning symptom. System A didn’t follow up to schedule that test, and, as is often the case, the patient asked friends and family for suggestions. The patient scheduled the test at another healthcare institution (“System B”) and was then referred to a specialist within the same group.
Unfortunately, System B misdiagnosed the patient. The patient’s disease progressed, which compromised their outcomes. When the patient reappeared in System A’s primary care, they were correctly assessed. But due to the lapse in correct treatment, the care was more burdensome for the patient; their healthcare costs were higher and the collateral damage greater.
It’s this personal story—not just the financial figures—that the health system should keep top of mind as it works to improve patient retention and continuity of care.
When patients disengage, it’s often because their digital experiences feel hollow, leaving them feeling forgotten and tempted to walk away. Some of the confounding factors include:
Healthcare systems simply aren’t converting the vast amounts of unique data points into an experience that eases a patient’s way through a complicated and highly complex healthcare system.
By and large, organizations have the right intentions: to close care gaps, improve quality measures, reduce readmissions, etc. Still, fragmentation erodes patient trust, leading to lackluster healthcare experiences that drive even satisfied patients away.
Solving this challenge is nuanced and requires more than a single tool or department. It demands a coordinated, cross-functional, data-driven approach—one that reflects the complexity of the patient journey and enables health systems to deliver timely, personalized, and quality care that engages patients and encourages return visits.
Patients don’t evaluate their healthcare experience in isolation. They expect to take care of their health with the same convenience, transparency, and personalization they’ve come to know from other digital experiences, such as booking travel, streaming digital content, or shopping with online retailers.
Their expectations have shifted to real-time updates, proactive communication, the application of previously expressed preferences, and suggested (and easily executable) next steps.
Consumer brands have set this new standard—leveraging copious amounts of data to understand their customers deeply. These expectations now extend to every interaction consumers have, including healthcare.
Today’s patient experiences must include:
When health systems fail to meet those expectations, patients disengage. And when they do, they don’t always return.
Stopping patient leakage through a consumer-driven approach begins with understanding patients—what they need, what motivates them, and where they fall off the care path. That starts with a strong data foundation.
Healthcare leaders need solutions that fit into their current systems without adding complexity, too. They need a way to combine clinical, operational, and financial data and insights, including patient behavior, to derive a deeper understanding of patients and meet their needs throughout the care journey.
These data and analytics ecosystems must help orchestrate care, forecast patient engagement, and prioritize care needs, while honing the nudge frequency and messaging channel, ultimately optimizing it for conversion versus abrasion.
Effective retention strategies engage patients at every stage of their care journey—not just during appointments—and reach beyond outcomes.
A layered approach that incorporates digital engagement, built on a strong data and analytics foundation, enables organizations to deliver more personalized communications. With this foundation, health systems can engage patients while considering multiple factors.
Grounded in this understanding of what modern healthcare organizations need to retain and strengthen patient experiences, while weathering present market conditions, we’ve refined our solution, Upfront by Health Catalyst™.
Powered by deep insights, Upfront personalizes communication across every channel to meet patients where they are. The solution enables health systems to guide patients toward the next best step in their care—from routine screenings to follow-up visits—creating meaningful engagement that leads to better outcomes.
The solution is designed to extend, not replace, the human touch. Built on Health Catalyst Ignite™ Data and Analytics, Upfront enables organizations to make existing data work harder to deliver a scalable, personalized approach to patient engagement. The result is a more attainable, less labor-intensive retention strategy before, during, and after the patient encounter.
Here’s how: by integrating patient data from across systems, Ignite identifies where patient engagement gaps exist. Upfront then applies psychographic data and personalized messages to activate patients toward timely, appropriate care. To tailor and optimize digital communications, Upfront leverages thousands of unique data points—demographics, clinical needs, SDOH, insurance benefits, patient location, available access and preferences, core values and motivations, and past behaviors.
The result? Patients feel seen, known, and supported, which increases their trust in the healthcare system. Plus, care quality increases. Provider-patient relationships flourish. And health systems retain more patients as they receive more necessary care, thanks to the availability and appropriateness of treatment options.
With Upfront by Health Catalyst, each patient receives personalized guidance throughout their unique care journey, enabling healthcare enterprises to leverage the data they already have to finally mirror the consumer-first experience patients have come to expect across other industries. This allows them to also differentiate from the one-size-fits-all outreach most competitors rely on—standardized, impersonal, and driven by the same underlying systems.
Upfront partnered with AdventHealth to activate patients on the fringe—those who were relatively healthy but disengaged and overdue for routine care, such as preventive screenings.
AdventHealth also wanted to achieve more with fewer clinical resources and build patient trust while improving health equity. Upfront identified patient segments based on behaviors, barriers, motivation, and preferences, and delivered unique activation strategies targeting critical care gaps to engage patients.
The outreach strategy leveraged automation and tailored messages delivered via secure email, SMS, and direct dial. It also included frictionless scheduling that didn’t require portal logins. As a result, AdventHealth achieved the following within 90 days:
Tackling patient leakage begins long before and after patients engage with health systems. It relies on connecting the right tools and people across care settings, all anchored in a foundation for connecting and acting on patient data.
Success comes from combining digital engagement strategies with the intent to support the patient before, during, and after every healthcare interaction.
By using a data platform purposefully built for healthcare to collate clinical, financial, and operational data and layering on a digital health solution like Upfront to translate that data into better outreach, health systems can effectively keep patients engaged and meet their expectations—improving the continuity of care, boosting patient loyalty, and bolstering healthcare outcomes.
Disconnected data systems can make it hard to understand and engage patients effectively. Our Patient Retention Playbook features practical strategies to strengthen operations and build lasting patient relationships.
Disconnected data systems can make it hard to understand and engage patients effectively. Our Patient Retention Playbook features practical strategies to strengthen operations and build lasting patient relationships.
