title: Measuring patient loss.
abstract: Few medical practices collect patient loss data. Yet patient defection has an enormous impact on practice profitability. Not only is the information on patient defection painful to analyze, but also difficult to capture. Patient requests for transfer of medical records are an insufficient measure of patient loss. Billing services are the likeliest source of patient loss data, but they have varying capabilities to provide this information, the information is often flawed, and each time a practice switches to a new billing service, it loses the ability to produce patient retention and defection data for a period of time. The previous article in this series detailed the costs of defection of patients to medical practice profitability together with methods to help retain patients. However, most practices do not or cannot quantify patient loss. This article concentrates on the problems of tracking defections and offers a possible solution through a focus on the data provided by billing systems.
authors.affiliation: Boston University Health Care Management Program, 595 Commonwealth Avenue, Boston, MA 02215, USA. rclarke@bu.edu
authors.forename: Roberta N
authors.initials: RN
authors.lastname: Clarke
mesh_terms: D003625:Data Collection; D006801:Humans; D007182:Income; D007344:Insurance Claim Reporting; D007349:Insurance, Health, Reimbursement; D010350:Patient Credit and Collection; D010352:Patient Dropouts / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D017060:Patient Satisfaction / Q000191:economics; D011216:Practice Management, Medical / Q000191:economics / Q000458:organization & administration*; D014481:United States