Understanding Client Retention: A Guide to Our Calculation Method and How to Tune it for Your Practice
- We find and then count the number of clients that were new for a clinician in the timeframe you select (see note below regarding timeframes). We flag clients as new if the date of their first intake session falls inside the timeframe. For practices that do not use a designated intake session, we use the first occurrence of any other session type.
- For each of the clients we found in step 1, we count how many attended at least 8 appointments, including the intake(s). We include billable cancels (late cancels and no shows) in the tally as well.
- Then, we calculate the retention rate by dividing the number of clients who attended at least 8 sessions by the total number of new clients identified in step 1.
A note regarding timeframes: If the end date of the timeframe you select falls within the last 8 weeks, we automatically adjust it to 8 weeks in the past to exclude any clients who had their first session within the last 8 weeks. This adjustment ensures that clients have a fair opportunity to attend 8 sessions before being considered in the retention metric, thereby preventing the metrics from being skewed either positively or negatively for the clinician.
Setting different retention and churn metrics thresholds for your practice
If you're interested in seeing how clinicians perform against a different retention threshold—let’s say 12 sessions instead of the default 8—you can go to the Retention report and change the number of sessions from 8 to 12. But what if you always want to use a different session threshold for your practice? Perhaps you provide a treatment or intervention that requires a greater number of sessions before it can be considered effective. Or maybe a significant portion of your clients have payers that restrict the number of sessions, making 8 sessions unrealistic.
To change the number of sessions used for measuring client retention and churn on the Practice Dashboard and in Clinician Metrics:
This feature is currently in beta and will be gradually rolled out to our customers.
- Go to Settings and scroll to the Metric Thresholds section.
- Click the Edit Thresholds button to make a change.
- Select the new new number of sessions you would like to use for the Retention threshold and/or Churn threshold. Make sure your Retention threshold is greater than your Churn threshold to prevent clients from being churned and retained, which wouldn't make sense.
- Click Save Changes and the new thresholds will take effect immediately.