By Opus Connect
A healthcare data firm believes it has found a surprisingly straightforward way to solve one of the industry’s most overlooked problems: bringing patients back into care. After combing through hundreds of thousands of electronic records, Brevium, a Utah-based healthcare technology company, discovered a pattern that seems almost embarrassingly simple. Patients don’t return because practices don’t reach out enough. Most stop after a single attempt.
The data, however, tell a different story, says Joe Casper, head of strategic accounts at Brevium, which has been studying patient-related patterns for more than 20 years.
“We looked at 100,000 patients that were returned for care,” he said during a recent Opus Connect conference in New York City. “The sweet spot was five contacts over the course of different communication tools.”
Not one text. Not one phone call. Five separate touches.
A Hidden Population of “Lost Patients”
Casper’s team uncovered this by combing through scheduling data and diagnosis codes—known in the industry by acronyms like CPT and ICD-10—alongside insurance details and provider records. What they found was staggering: huge numbers of “lost patients” with no future appointment or scheduled future recall on the books.
In one dermatology group with 600 providers, for instance, the firm found 1.1 million patients who lacked a follow-up visit. Another dermatology platform showed 17,000 basal cell carcinoma patients who had not been back in over a year. In a cardiology group, people with congestive heart failure—whom you might assume don’t easily slip through cracks—had quietly stopped showing up.
“You go and you dig into these elements, you're gonna go and find them,” Casper said. “And then what happens is, you communicate with them. And guess what? These patients go and come back.”
What the Records Revealed
But why are so many patients missing in the first place?
The healthcare system, Casper argues, is built around the assumption that patients act rationally, keep track of their conditions, remember follow-ups, and call back when they have to. In reality, people forget. They get busy. They assume one missed call isn’t a big deal.
Women, who often manage the healthcare needs of entire families, were 60 percent of the patients who returned once contacted repeatedly. Casper sees that as evidence of how easily self-care falls to the bottom of the list.
The High Stakes of Not Calling Back
The financial and clinical stakes of inaction are enormous. Casper estimates that reactivating 10,000 lost patients generates between $1 million and $1.5 million in organic revenue over twelve months. In dermatology, oncology, cardiology, and ophthalmology, the clinical impact is even more urgent: untreated cancers progress; unmanaged glaucoma leads to irreversible damage; heart-failure patients deteriorate quietly until they reappear in emergency rooms.
The daily nature of the problem compounds it. “Every single night we’ll read the data,” Casper said. “More patients come in.” In other words, don’t see lost patients as a backlog to be cleared. Treat them as a constant influx.
But the obstacles don’t end at identifying the patients. Even when a practice wants to adopt a more persistent outreach model, many are unprepared for the wave of returning patients. Casper recalled visiting one Florida practice: “Every time I walk past the communication room, I get death stares from the people there,” the CFO told him. The idea of adding “20%, 30% more calls on them,” Casper said it was nearly impossible to keep up without reorganizing staffing and adding additional remote call-center agents. This combination of increased patient demand and improved call-conversion capability has resulted in back-to-back years of 40% growth.
“If you don’t convert these calls, if you don’t answer them quickly, you know, it’s all for nothing,” he said.
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