Patient visit average (PVA) is the average number of times a patient goes to your practice during their time as a patient.
From the business standpoint, this is a really important metric. It can help tell you:
- How much you can expect to make per customer.
- How much profit you can expect to make per customer.
- Whether people are returning and your business is growing, or whether they are leaving and your business is shrinking.
- How much you can spend in marketing and advertising to acquire a new patient profitably.
PVA can tell you how many times a patient visits you. And when you multiply this by the average appointment cost, that’s where you can figure out things like how much you can expect to make from the average patient. This—combined with some other numbers—lets you work backwards from your ideal practice size (see our article here).
From a business standpoint, PVA is an extremely important metric.
It tells you—objectively—whether people continue to come to you or whether they leave. It can tell you whether your business is on track to grow (an increasing PVA) or shrink (a decreasing PVA).
So, with PVA being such an important metric, let’s dive into how to calculate it and what you can do to improve it.
Watch the video here, or keep scrolling to read the article.
How to calculate PVA
Patient visit average is calculated by dividing the total number of appointments over a period by the total number of new patients seen over that period.
A lot of EHRs will keep track of this data for you. Then, all you have to do is find the numbers and divide them in order to figure out your PVA.
For example, in Jane App (the EHR almost all of my clients have used), you can find these numbers by going to Reports > Patient Retention.
You can then select the period you’d like to see the numbers over, and you’ll see the “New Patients” number and “Total Visits” number.
To find out whether this number is growing or not, you can calculate it for different periods. So, for example, you could compare your PVA for this year against your PVA from last year.
Generally, you should compare longer timeframes (several months or longer). This will help reduce the effects of month-to-month volatility that may make it hard to accurately judge whether your PVA is going up or not.
How to improve PVA
Before we get into some tactics to increase PVA, there are some things that should be mentioned first:
If your PVA stays terrible, it may be that you’re not fixing your patient’s problem. This may be because you’re setting incorrect expectations and they aren’t coming in enough times to get the full benefit.
For example, if you know that it usually takes 10 appointments before people start feeling back to normal and they only come in 3 times, then you might not be setting correct expectations. They might think it’ll only take 3 appointments and when they don’t feel better after those 3, they stop coming.
In cases like these, you’ll want to tell new patients how many appointments you think it’ll take to get them healed. Then, try to book all their appointments ahead of time. Appointments can always be canceled if the patient is feeling better.
At the very least, in cases like these, you want to make sure to book out their next appointment. Try not to leave them in “no man’s land,” where they don’t know when their next appointment is or if they should even have one.
With that out of the way, let’s get into some ways to improve PVA.
Most of the time, people don’t come back because they get busy and forget. Sometimes, though, they may feel that you don’t care.
So, the best tactics to improve PVA are simply ways to keep in touch in a:
- helpful way
- that shows you care.
This will eventually make you top-of-mind in a positive fashion. Here are some of the ways that I’ve seen that work the most successfully:
- Mail them a handwritten letter.
This one definitely falls under the “shows you care” category.
Not many people get handwritten letters nowadays, so when they do, they tend to pay attention. So, this can be a great way to get people’s attention and show that you care.
You can send these pretty much whenever. But if you send it when they first become a new patient, it can stand out more and make the other tactics work that much better.
It doesn’t have to be anything fancy. You can simply write them a letter saying something like: You appreciate them for trusting you with their health, you hope they’re feeling better, and you look forward to seeing them at their next appointment.
After that, you can send one every few months or year to help stay top-of-mind even better.
- Send an email newsletter.
An email newsletter is fairly impersonal, but it can help send your patients useful information.
For example, you can send them health information that help them to live a healthier life, reach their health goals, etc.
Email newsletters tend to be the highest quantity way to stay in contact with your patients. It’s hard to send a handwritten letter to all your patients each week, but it’s pretty easy to send an email to all of them each week.
When you do the other, more personal forms of contact, people will often pay more attention to your email newsletters. So, an email newsletter can help to reduce the frequency of other tactics. For best results, you should still do them but having an email newsletter can act as more of a buffer between your other forms of contact.
This is something we can help with if you’re interested. We manage the whole email newsletter on your behalf—from writing the emails to sending them. If that’s something you’re interested in, schedule a free consultation here.
- Call/text/email them personally.
By personally, I mean without the use of mass communication technology such as autoresponders. This makes it more personable and helps it stand out more.
This can be done after hours or during slow times to check in on them and see how they’re doing. One of the most successful approaches I’ve heard is checking in on their most recent health issue.
You could also send them information that they personally might find interesting/helpful. Basically, you can do this as a more personal form of an email newsletter to perfectly tailor it to what your patient needs at the time.
Generally, once every couple of weeks works well for this form of communication.
- Wish them a happy birthday.
One (successful) chiropractor I talked to basically only wished people a happy birthday as a form of staying in contact.
When it was their birthday, they would personally send them a happy birthday message over Facebook Messenger.
Others have automated emails set up for wishing people happy birthday.
Big companies will do this because it works. So, however you do it, it may be worth adding this into your business as well.
- Offer maintenance/checkup plans.
A lot of other doctors have stuff like this. The general practitioner has yearly checkups, the dentist has once-or-twice-a-year cleanings, etc.
This may not be for everyone, obviously, but some of your patients may appreciate something like an appointment every-so-often to make sure they’re doing well, help with injury prevention, etc.
So, in cases like that, you can set up some kind of maintenance or checkup plan (it can be official or unofficial) and schedule them ahead of time. Then, just always make sure to get their next appointment on the calendar so you’ll know when you’ll see them next. They can always cancel or move the appointment if they don’t need it, but putting something on the calendar increases clarity for everyone.
There’s some info on what Patient Visit Average is, how you calculate it, and some tactics to improve it. I hope it was helpful.
If you’d like to learn more about how we can help you improve your PVA with an email newsletter, schedule a free consultation here. The call is free, it’s super casual, and worst-case scenario is that you get some more information. Just click here to schedule a call.