Aventine Partners

Stronger Patient Relationships

This summer, as most of America became embroiled in the debate over health care reform, we had the privilege of working with a client looking to reform how health care is delivered at an innovative chain of dental clinic.

A health care outsider had been brought in to run and grow this business.  He began to ask questions about patient relationships, but couldn't easily find the answers.  Questions like:

• What is our patient retention rate?
• Which of our offices, dentists, or hygienists do the best job of generating loyal patients?
• What is the value of a patient? 
• Why do patients defect?    

We worked with his team to develop a set of metrics and analyses that began to shine a spotlight on some surprising patient retention statistics and the potential value to be created by managing both patient retention and acquisition differently.

Who's Your Customer?

Has the general business and commercial environment become more or less humane in the past years and decades? 

Whatever your thoughts about the current tenor of the marketplace, our language has certainly become nicer.  I remember being comforted when my first employer announced that it would be rightsizing its workforce.  No more heartless downsizings for them.  Of course employees are now associates or partners, and most job descriptions seem to have been upgraded, even if everything else has gotten worse for the poor employee/associate/partner.

So if you believe, as I do, that the reality for workers and consumers has coarsened while our labels have gotten nicer, you might wonder to what extent these phenomena are related.

I was therefore heartened to see a recent announcement by the FAA (as reported in the Wall Street Journal) that they would no longer call airlines, the entities they are chartered to regulate, customers.  Apparently someone there realized that feel-good labels can get in the way of getting the job done right.

Terminology matters, and choices that feel good sometimes obscure the truth.