Retention Cohorts Report

A longer-term question than most patient reports ask

Most patient reports answer a question about right now: who's lapsed, who's due for a recall, who signed up this month. Retention Cohorts asks a slower, more structural question instead — of the patients who first visited your clinic during a given period, how many of them are still coming back months later? It's less about spotting an individual patient to act on today and more about understanding whether your clinic, as a whole, is actually good at keeping the patients it wins.

That distinction matters because new-patient volume can be a misleading success metric on its own. A clinic bringing in thirty new patients a month but losing most of them after one visit is in a very different position than a clinic bringing in twenty a month and retaining most of them for years, even though the second clinic looks smaller on paper. Retention Cohorts is how you tell those two situations apart.

The Retention Cohorts report showing several monthly cohort rows with retention rate trending downward for more recent cohorts.

What a cohort actually is

A cohort, in this report, is simply a group of patients who all had their first visit to your clinic during the same period — for example, everyone whose first visit fell in March. Instead of treating your whole patient base as one undifferentiated pool, the report splits new patients into these period-based groups and then tracks each one separately over time to see how many of its members have come back since.

The reason this grouping is useful rather than just an extra layer of complexity is that it lets you compare like with like. Asking "what percentage of all our patients ever have come back" mixes together a patient who joined five years ago with one who joined last week, which tells you very little. Asking "of the patients who joined in March, how many have come back" gives every patient in that comparison the same amount of time to have returned, so the resulting percentage actually means something.

Filters

• <strong>Date range</strong> — sets which first-visit periods are included as cohorts in the report. A wider range includes more, and older, cohorts.
• <strong>Location</strong> — restricts results to a single clinic location, or shows all locations combined.

Because retention takes time to show up, it's worth setting the date range wide enough to include cohorts that are at least several months old. A range that only includes the last few weeks will mostly show brand-new cohorts that haven't had a real chance to return yet, which makes the report look worse than it is rather than showing a genuine retention problem.

KPI tiles

• <strong>Cohorts shown</strong> — the number of distinct first-visit periods included in the current view, based on your date range.
• <strong>New patients</strong> — the total count of new patients across all the cohorts currently shown.
• <strong>Retained</strong> — the total count of patients, across those same cohorts, who have come back for at least one subsequent visit.

Reading the Retention by signup cohort table

Each row in the table is one cohort, identified by its first-visit period. Reading down the table from oldest to newest cohort is usually more informative than reading any single row in isolation, because it shows you a trend rather than a snapshot — is retention improving, holding steady, or slipping as more recent cohorts come in?

FAQ