Retention and Churn Rates

Retention and Churn measure the duration of care clients receive. A client is considered "retained" if they have at least 8 sessions, and "churned" if they have fewer than 4 sessions.

While individual clients' needs my vary, the aggregated rate across your entire practice, or for an individual clinician, is an important measure of performance. In general, it costs money to acquire a new client, so higher retention and lower churn correspond to higher profitability.

To calculate retention over a timeframe, we first look at the unique clients whose intake occurred during the timeframe, and then find how many of those clients went on to have at least 8 sessions. Similarly, for churn, we look at how many of those clients had fewer than 4 sessions.

In Q1, 100 clients had intakes.

• 80 went on to have 8 or more sessions

• 8 had 1-3 sessions

• 12 had between 4-7 sessions

In this example, the retention rate is 80%, and the churn rate is 8%.

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• Each client/clinician pair is included at most once, even if there are multiple sessions categorized as "intake".

• If a client sees multiple clinicians, they appear in the calculation for each clinician.

• Sessions categorized as "Billable Cancel" count towards the retention threshold. Other cancels do not.

• When calculating retention and churn, each session counts as 1, independent of the Completed Session Counting Rules you've set up.

• Retention and Churn rates include everyone, regardless of whether their status is currently inactive or discharged.

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The Retention Report allows you to run a retention report for a value other than 8. This allows you to find out, for example, how many clients from a timeframe went on to have 10, or 12, or any other number of sessions. The report also shows more details like the average sessions per client per clinician.

On the Clinician Metrics, Clinician Detail, and Practice Dashboard pages, the Retention Rate shown uses the 8 session threshold, and Churn Rate uses a 4 session threshold.

On the Retention Report, you may sometimes see a notice like this:

When your selected timeframe is close to "today", PracticeVital automatically shortens it for accuracy. If a client started 5 days ago and has had 1 session, it's unrealistic to expect them to already have 8 sessions. It's also unrealistic to consider them "churned", because they very well might go on to have 8 sessions -- time will tell. Therefore, we exclude those clients from the calculation entirely so they don't skew the metrics in either direction.

When shortening the timeframe, we assume 1 session per week. When calculating 8 session retention, clients with intake dates in the most recent 8 weeks are excluded. Likewise, when calculating 5 session retention, clients with intake dates in the most recent 5 weeks are excluded.