Patient Retention Analysis in Cardiology Services

This case study documents the challenges faced by a large integrated healthcare system in understanding patient retention and movement within its cardiovascular service line. The healthcare leadership struggled with reconciling internal billing data with external claims, leading to a lack of reliable data for assessing patient retention. The study outlines the implementation of Kythera's Wayfinder DataSync, which harmonized internal and external data sources to create a comprehensive dataset. This approach improved visibility into patient movement and established a baseline for evaluating retention metrics. The analysis focused on non-procedural encounters, revealing significant improvements in keepage rates from 61% to 72% and a reduction in leakage by 11 percentage points. The findings indicate an estimated annualized value associated with retained encounters ranging from $1.6M to $3.8M. The study emphasizes the importance of data harmonization in enhancing decision-making processes in competitive healthcare markets.