Understanding the performance of your bariatric program is critical to your long-term growth and improvement in patient care. Yet, most bariatric providers and programs have little to no insight into how their staff is performing and how their patients navigate through the bariatric funnel (consult to surgery).

Bariatric Program Reports to Measure Growth

Whether you are a bariatric provider a part of a large health system, or you grind out the day-to-day in private practice, these bariatric program reports will help you understand the health of your bariatric program and the satisfaction of your patients.

1. Conversion Rates

Understanding how effectively your patients navigate through the funnel is probably the single, most important metric to track in measuring the performance of your bariatric program. Not only will this help you when finding your top-performing bariatric patient navigators, but the conversion rate report will also help you understand where bottlenecks are occurring.

You will gain insight into the stage at which patients are least likely to convert, whether most of your patients are falling out between the scheduled and attended consult phase or from attended to surgery phase. Patient leak (fall-out) is inevitable, but comprehending where this is occurring in the funnel can help your program make changes to eliminate bottlenecks and diminish the lost revenue.

This report provides even more knowledge when you can break it down based on insurance type and referral source (physician, self, or online) so you can spend more time and effort navigating your highest-converting patients.

2. Attendance Rate

A part of understanding your conversion ratios is gaining insight into the attendance rate of your patients based on insurance payer, surgeon, and location (if you have multiple surgeons and offices within one bariatric program). You will want to know what percentage of your patients are attending their scheduled visits and what percentage of them are no-showing or rescheduling to another date.

From there, you can drill down into making actionable decisions that will help you predict revenue, understand barriers to attending, and even make changes to your processes as needed. Based on your analysis, you may even want to institute personalized and automated outreach to patients who are less likely to attend.

3. Anticipated Surgery Dates

From the time a bariatric patient attends their initial consultation, you know roughly how long it should take that patient to get through the process based on the pre-op diet length set forth by their insurance payer. Therefore, you can estimate an anticipated surgery date (ASD), which is a formula calculated by adding their pre-op diet length to their consult date (plus one more month to get them approved for surgery).

When you run reports on this date, you can drill down to find a list of patients who have an ASD next month to predict surgery volume or see patients who have an ASD that is in the past. However, along with running these reports, you will also want to hold bi-weekly or monthly meetings with your bariatric navigators to question them on the status of their patients.

Do these patients have a surgery date if their ASD is next month, and why have these patients not yet been scheduled for surgery?

After implementing these bariatric program reports and scheduling regular meetings, you will be pleasantly surprised to see how your surgery volume is positively impacted.

4. Average Length of Time in Categories

The bariatric process is long and arduous for both the patient and the navigator. It is not uncommon for your patients to become stalled within one category and not progress for months. If you are not evaluating this data regularly, you could be leaving money on the table.

Most insurance providers will require the patient to get through the process within 12 months, or else their documents will expire, and the patient will need to complete specific requirements again. Not only is this a significant barrier to the patient to continue/restart the process, but it is also a bother to your bariatric staff.

By running regular reports on the length of time a patient is in any given category (i.e., in the insurance approval bucket yet not scheduled for a consult or in the completed requirements bucket with no surgery date), you will be able to have your navigators proactively reach out and move the patient along in the process.

5. Net Promoter Score

The net promoter score (NPS) is a popular method to track customer/patient satisfaction and is used across various industries. The main question the net promoter score seeks to answer is how likely your patients are to recommend your bariatric program to a family member or a friend.

The NPS report will allow you to gain insight into how satisfied your patients were with the process to get to surgery and what could be improved. You may want to ask questions regarding appointment scheduling barriers or how responsive your staff was throughout the process. And like any of the above reports, tracking net promoter scores will focus your efforts on understanding the health of your program and improving patient care.