The Psychology Behind Patient Reactivation

It’s no secret that patient engagement is critical for keeping patients invested in their care journey. Engaged patients are not only more likely to achieve better health outcomes, but also experience greater satisfaction with their overall healthcare experience. 

But what happens when patients slip? With the increasing demands and stressors thrown on medical practices, some relationships will naturally fall through. However, patient reactivation plays a significant role in salvaging these lost relationships by strategically re-engaging patients lost to follow up and ensuring they don’t remain missing from critical care. This process is crucial for both your patients’ health and your clinic’s success. While implementing the best strategies and tools for customer reactivation are important, medical practices will find greater success with their reactivation campaigns by understanding the deep-rooted patient psychology behind these strategies. This blog post explores the psychology behind patient disengagement and provides valuable insight into how practices can leverage this understanding to drive long-term patient engagement. 

Understanding Why Patients Become ‘Lost to Follow Up’

Every medical practice has patients that are lost to follow up—patients that, for one reason or another, have slipped through the cracks of your practice and fallen out of compliance with essential care. Let’s explore six common reasons your patients might fall inactive:

1. Life Changes: These changes include relocation, marital status, income, and much more. Basically, any life change that might cause your patients to put their care on the backburner.
2. Insurance: Switching insurance carriers often means changes to coverage—a factor that heavily influences where patients seek their treatment. If your patients’ new insurance isn’t accepted by your practice or if the coverage means more money out of their pockets, they may fall out of care. 
3. Dissatisfaction: Poor experiences with their providers, practice staff or any aspect of the overall patient experience (i.e. long wait times) could influence patients to seek care elsewhere or cease treatment completely. Tebra’s 2023 patient experience survey found that 73 percent of patients would leave a medical practice because of a negative experience with their healthcare provider.  
4. Forgetfulness: Let’s face it: Patients are busy and without the right engagement tools, they might let their essential treatment fall down the priority list. These are your patients who have cancelled or no-showed appointments and failed to schedule follow ups. Forgetful patients make up a huge chunk of your patients that are lost to follow up and simply need to be motivated to return for care. 
5. Beliefs: When patients don’t fully understand their diagnoses, they will be less likely to engage in crucial preventative care. For some patients, they may expect their conditions to improve over time without the need for medical intervention. For others, the perceived severity of their condition isn’t what they think and don’t believe follow-up to be necessary. Some patients may think that treatment wouldn’t help in their case. 
6. Healthcare Anxiety: Many patients have severe healthcare anxiety surrounding their diagnoses and recommended treatment plans—so much that they would rather avoid care than face what’s ahead. The potential side effects from taking new medications or undergoing procedures can be anxiety-inducing for anyone, especially those with more severe conditions.

The reasons patients leave their medical practice or avoid care can be highly nuanced, but attempting to understand why patients become lost to follow up is the first step to finding solutions to reduce avoidance and bring your patients back. Your understanding of patients’ unique needs and psychological barriers to receiving care will ultimately guide your reactivation campaign and the strategies used to re-engage your patients in their care. 

The Psychological Impact of Proactive Communication

People crave connection and empathy from others—your patients are no different. Effective, proactive communication therefore becomes an integral part of the healthcare process, if not the very foundation for developing a patient-provider relationship built on trust and empathetic care. This especially applies to your patients who are lost to follow up. Because your patients have slipped through the cracks and remained there for years, your overdue patient base may need more persistence and compassion to influence change.   

So, where do you start? First, practices should understand what defines an engaged patient:

1. Informed: Patients understand why they are being contacted to return for care, including their current health status and recommended care plan. 
2. Heard: Patients engage in productive conversation with their providers, expressing questions and/or concerns about future treatment and expectations. Rather than simply being told what to do, patients become actively engaged in their care by participating in shared decision-making.
3. Empowered: Patients believe that further treatment and procedures could influence their health outcomes and quality of life.  
4. Active: Patients act by scheduling appointments or crafting plans to return for care based on personal findings and prior communication and education initiatives from their providers. 

Only when medical practices understand the psychology behind re-engagement will they be able to craft personalized communications to win their patients back; after all, your outreach strategy should closely reflect the qualities of engaged patients by relaying relevant information, hearing and empathizing with concerns, answering questions, clarifying, and empowering action. This effective patient outreach not only alleviates anxieties or concerns about returning for care but also leads to enhanced health outcomes and increased compliance akin to showing up for appointments, adherence to recommended treatment, symptom control, and increased satisfaction. 

Motivation and Behavioral Triggers for Reactivation

While no medical practice can completely avoid patient non-adherence, they can take steps to reduce its occurrence and motivate overdue patients to be compliant with essential care. Ultimately, motivating patients to take action and become active participants in their own healthcare starts with effective communication. Through this strategic and personalized outreach, medical practices can start an honest conversation on the benefits of continued treatment and risks of missing preventative care, using active listening to gain a deeper understanding of their patients’ perspectives and concerns and consequently, empower them to participate in making important decisions for their own health. As a result of these communication efforts, medical practices can influence their patients’ beliefs that continuous treatment will lead to enhanced health outcomes and a greater quality of life. 

Here are a few key ways your practice can use psychological motivators in its outreach to return patients lost to follow up back to the clinic:

1. Custom Messaging: What you say to motivate your patients to return for treatment matters. Rather than cold, generic patient reactivation scripts, medical practices should frame the content and wording of their communications around well-being and enhanced outcomes. By using verbiage that explains the reason for the contact and expresses concerns for their health, your patients will be more likely to return for care. 

2. Polite Persistence: The reality of patient reactivation campaigns is that most patients will not respond to the first contact; in fact, Brevium’s data shows that practices see the highest rate of return after contacting a patient six times. Though the process may take several months, polite persistence pays off by showing through action that your patients’ health is of the highest priority. This persistence consistently reminds patients that they should be receiving additional care and keeps your practice top-of-mind until they are ready to schedule an appointment.  

3. Multi-Channel Communication: Some patients might find it annoying and spammy to receive six text messages telling them to return for care. Instead, medical practices can use different modes of communication to reach patients where they are. With six different options to choose from (i.e. staff calls, autocalls, text messaging, emails, letters, and postcards), Brevium allows customers to be intentional with their outreach. Implementing live staff calls adds another layer of personalization because staff can refer to the patient’s treatment history. This outreach approach helps patients feel unique and valued, motivating them to once again return to your clinic for care.

Building Long-Term Patient Engagement with Brevium

Patients ultimately determine how invested they will be in their treatment journey. However, your practice plays a critical role in motivating patients lost to follow up to re-engage in their healthcare. By implementing the previously explored re-engagement strategies, including patient education, active listening, shared decision-making, and proactive patient communication, medical practices can avoid future “lost to follow up” scenarios and maintain a loyal patient base. 

Though patient engagement is a complex process with many moving parts, it’s never been easier than with Brevium’s patented patient reactivation solutions. No matter the reason for disengagement, Brevium finds your overdue patients and employs unique automated engagement solutions to win them back. There are mutual benefits when medical practices implement Brevium’s patient reactivation strategies for long-term engagement:

For Medical Practices:

1. Increased Revenue & ROI

Reactivating patients lost to follow up is not only cheaper than acquiring new patients but also a unique way to access a previously untapped revenue source. This proprietary technology works to increase appointment volume and practice profitability by strategically targeting and bringing back the highest-priority patients for essential exams and preventative care. Because they have been missing from care for so long, it’s common for reactivated patients to need additional treatment and procedures following their first return appointment. In fact, Brevium found in its 2019 ALOHA Study that practices generate an average of $174 in revenue upon their return and an additional $284 over 12 months, showcasing the software’s ability to drive lasting compliance and engagement. 

2. Boosted Credibility

Medical practices that invest time, effort and resources into re-engaging their overdue patients show their inactive patient base that they value their relationships and prioritize their health. These re-engagement efforts serve as a credibility boost for your practice and care providers, as patients who return for care and have a positive experience are more likely to refer patients and leave positive ratings. With Brevium, practices have access to patented data mining tools that allow them to strategically target high-risk and high-value patients using ICD-10 and CPT codes among other unique patient identifiers—meaning practices know exactly who they are reactivating and why they need to return for care. Using personalized messaging to inform their patients of the reason they are being contacted, the provider requesting their return and the treatment location, patients will feel known, boosting the odds of them engaging with your outreach. 

For Patients:

1. Continuity of Care

Regular check-ups and preventative care are essential to enhancing your patients’ quality of life and longevity. By re-engaging overdue patients and implementing retention strategies to keep them coming back, your patients can resume their treatment journeys without disruptions, leading to enhanced health outcomes and increased satisfaction. With Brevium, the care journey doesn’t stop with patient reactivation. Brevium offers unique appointment reminder and patient recall technology that bridges the gap in patient care—offering tools and support to engage patients throughout their entire treatment cycle. 

2. Fosters Trust and Satisfaction

We’ve already established that patients seek connection and value from their care providers. Luckily, Brevium does just that through its strategic patient outreach strategy. With a “polite persistence” mentality, medical practices can use Brevium to continually re-engage their patients, emphasizing the notion that they are more than just another number. This persistence, along with Brevium’s personalized messaging templates that allows practices to customize according to language, reason, provider and location, shows patients that their providers care about their health.

Conclusion

Brevium understands that effectively reactivating patients that are lost to follow up requires more than a basic re-engagement strategy—it also means providing genuine care that turns your overdue patients back into loyal and satisfied customers. Brevium’s patented technology was created for this reason, implementing insights from leading doctors, administrators and other healthcare professionals to deliver a product that helps practices fuel organic growth and more importantly, provide high-quality patient-centered care. By focusing on the psychology behind patient behavior and engagement, practices can fine-tune their reactivation strategies to nurture patient relationships and generate greater returns.