According to an industry report, 78% of healthcare services and delivery leaders say the COVID-19 pandemic, and its transition to an endemic, have made controlling patient leakage a higher priority. The continuing lag in recovery and recuperation to reach normalized pre-pandemic new patient volumes and existing patient visit frequency from their established panels — coupled with the additional headwinds of staffing shortages, supply chain disruption, new entrants into the care delivery landscape, and the increasing costs associated with delivering care — is negatively impacting financial stability, and contributing to negative EBITDA trends.
That same report revealed that 65% of healthcare system leaders and providers confidently state that continued increases in referral leakage blocked them from reaching and achieving their strategic imperatives in 2022 and has strained the revenue streams associated with those imperatives. They also believe that this trend will continue through 2023, and mitigation strategies are an urgent need.
Yet, despite these statistics, the majority of healthcare delivery leaders and providers across all care and service silos within the industry have not been able to facilitate a consistent and centralized process-driven approach to quantify, assess, and visualize the totality of their referral volume and its patterning. They are unable to consistently identify and isolate the reason codes (both controllable and non-controllable) creating or contributing to their gross and net leakage rates without extensive effort and heavily manual process flows, and they do not have the resources to execute this initiative with the frequency and consistency required to effectively measure, manage, and implement corrective actions to reverse the trend.
The key to mitigation and remediation of the trend is to understand how to solve the leakage, optimize the contributing factors driving the keepage, and how to better define the true penetration of the consumer/patient/provider market that generates the referral volumes, by type, payer mix, and condition code needed to attain the topline revenue and growth targets for their business models.
Learn how healthcare data analytics and CRM solutions improve provider referral patterning, reduce referral leakage, and enhance patient care.