Measuring Patient Loyalty with Net Promoter Score

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There are several ways to measure patient loyalty. Some of our clients simply use the Loyalty question as part of their standard M3 questionnaire, while others have added a loyalty question to their custom question line-up, when needed.

Another good indicator of patient loyalty is Net Promoter Score (NPS). Net Promoter Score was first developed in 1993 by Fred Reichheld and later adopted in 2003 by Bain & Company and Satmetrix. Net Promoter Score has been used across service industries for many years to gauge patient loyalty. During the last five years or so we were seeing more healthcare organizations utilize the NPS metric to measure patient loyalty, as a result, MedicalGPS added NPS to the suite of M3-Patient Experience® on-line analytics some time ago.

There are pros and cons to using the metric — as there are with any performance metric – none are perfect. Click the hyperlink here to dig into some the pros and cons related to using NPS.

Below is a graphic that we put together for one of our clients that shows how their NPS score is calculated, year to date. Your practice’s NPS, of course, is calculated exactly the same way.

It starts by asking the Recommend question, using a 0-10 point scale.

How likely is it that you would recommend [practice name] to a friend or colleague?
10 Extremely Likely
9
8
7
6
5
4
3
2
1
0 Not at all likely

After gathering survey responses, survey respondents are grouped as follows:

Promoters (score 9-10) are loyal patients who are very likely to keep coming to the practice, even if they experience subpar service every once in a while.

Passives (score 7-8) are patients that are satisfied with the practice’s service and care, but are not necessarily enthusiastic or loyal patients, which makes them somewhat vulnerable to the competition.

Detractors (score 0-6) are unhappy patients who can damage the practice’s reputation and adversely impact growth of the practice through negative postings on social media sites and by spreading negative word-of-mouth opinions through all sorts of communication means.

The NPS score is calculated by subtracting the percentage of Detractors from the percentage of Promoters, as shown in the graphic below.

Using the MedicalGPS national database, the MGPS Net Promoter Score, aggregated for all of our clients, is 85.8 year-to-date. As you can see, the practice depicted above is at 94.2 — an outstanding performance, especially considering the healthy sample size of 294 patients submitting feedback.

If you would like to review your practice’s NPS to see how your practice is doing, just login to M3-Patient Experience, click “Reporting” and then, from the menu on the left-hand side of the screen click “NPS Report”.

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