S
urgical facilities track a lot of data — quality measures, patient
census, service line revenue and so on. But here's something
that no one regularly tracks: lifetime value. Yes, it's hard to
track something that you don't have a clue exists. Look at it this way:
What's a relationship worth to your business, whether your business
is a hospital, an ambulatory surgery center, some other healthcare
facility or a medical practice?
Originally from the marketing world (where it remains a very power-
ful idea), the concept of lifetime value involves looking at the worth of
a customer not as the one-off revenue
from a discrete sale or transac-
tion, but as the value of the
stream of sales or transac-
tions over the entire lifespan
of the customer relationship.
Let's look at an example
involving a sporting
goods store. From the
marketing context, a
customer's value in
dollars to the business
isn't the average indi-
vidual sale, perhaps
$29.97. Instead, the true
value is the total com-
bined sales to the aver-
age customer over the life-
What's the Lifetime Value of a Patient?
Calculating the true worth of a relationship to your surgical business.
Economic Intelligence
Mark F. Weiss, JD
3 6 • O U T PA T I E N T S U R G E R Y M A G A Z I N E • J U L Y 2 0 1 9
