"Incredibly simple and easy to use app. Exactly what we were looking for."
Nuala C.
Director, BrandFire
Healthcare Loyalty Program Development Services
Healthcare loyalty that rewards the next visit, not just the last purchase.
Healthcare loyalty is different from retail loyalty in one important way: the behaviour you want to reward is clinically beneficial, not just commercially convenient. A dental practice wants patients to come back every six months, not once every two years when a tooth hurts. A wellness brand wants users to book regular appointments, not download the app and disappear. The loyalty mechanics have to match that clinical rhythm.
RaftLabs builds custom loyalty programs for hospitals, health systems, dental networks, and wellness brands. Visit-based rewards, preventive care incentives, wellness challenges, and patient retention programs, all built to handle PHI under HIPAA, all integrated with your EHR or practice management system.
Visit-based earn integrated with your EHR or PMS so earn triggers automatically at the appointment, not via manual upload
Preventive care incentives that reward health screenings, annual checkups, and vaccination appointments
Wellness challenge programs including step challenges, weight loss programs, and quit smoking campaigns
Patient retention programs for dental, optometry, and physio practices where recall frequency drives revenue
Member data handling built for HIPAA-regulated PHI, with data residency and audit trails
Full IP ownership, no per-member fees, no platform dependency
Bring the problem, the current workflow, or the existing code. We reply with a practical next step within one business day.
Trusted by
The brief
Start with what is not working.
Good software decisions begin with the constraint, not a list of features or a preferred technology.
01
Dental practice losing patients to a competitor running a rewards program and you have nothing to match it?
02
Wellness brand with a mobile app but no reason for users to open it between bookings?
03
Health system that wants to incentivise preventive care attendance but has no mechanism beyond email reminders that get ignored?
Plain answer
RaftLabs builds loyalty programs for hospitals, health systems, dental networks, and wellness brands, designed to handle PHI under HIPAA. Capabilities include visit-based earn via EHR and PMS integration, preventive care incentives, wellness challenge programs, and patient retention mechanics for recall-dependent practices. Full source code ownership, no per-member fees.
What to remember
- RaftLabs builds loyalty programs for hospitals, health systems, dental networks, and wellness brands, designed to handle PHI under HIPAA
- Visit-based earn triggers automatically at appointment completion via EHR or practice management system integration with no front desk action required
- RaftLabs migrated roughly 500,000 member records to a new rewards platform and cut support tickets by 80%
- Full source code ownership with no per-member fees and no platform dependency
- The Stark and anti-kickback bright line is OIG's nominal-value threshold of 15 dollars per item and 75 dollars annual aggregate per beneficiary; consult legal counsel on the Anti-Kickback Statute before launch.
The recall she booked before she left the chair.
A patient loyal to one dentist follows that dentist to a new practice. A patient loyal to the practice comes back every six months, whoever is in the chair, and refers friends to the practice rather than the person. A loyalty program is what builds the second kind.
She finishes a routine check-up. The appointment is marked complete in the practice management system, and before she reaches the front desk her account has already earned, with no one keying anything in. On her phone, the recall reward is worth enough that booking the next six-month visit now, rather than when a tooth starts to hurt, is the obvious move. She books it from the app and leaves.
That single rebooking is the visible edge of the platform. Underneath it: earn triggered by a clinical event rather than a purchase, a reward priced to reinforce the visit you actually want, and member data handled to HIPAA standards from the first appointment on.
The failure mode for healthcare loyalty is a rewards program that has nothing to do with why patients come back. Points for buying branded merchandise, discounts on optional add-ons, a punch card that fills up in four years at a twice-yearly dentist. The program runs in parallel with the clinical relationship, affects nothing, and gets cancelled when no one can explain what it achieved.
Healthcare loyalty works when the earn trigger is a clinical event, when the reward reinforces the behaviour you want, and when the mechanics match the clinical rhythm of the relationship. A dental practice wants to see patients every six months. The program should reward the six-month recall appointment at a rate that makes rescheduling immediately after the visit feel financially rational. A wellness brand wants daily engagement. The program should create a reason to open the app on a day without an appointment.
Research by Bain & Company, published in Harvard Business Review, found that a 5% lift in customer retention raises profits by 25% to 95% (Reichheld, Bain & Company). Healthcare feels that twice over. A patient who lapses is lost revenue and a missed checkup, and winning one back costs far more than holding onto the patient already in your book.
RaftLabs has built digital engagement and loyalty platforms handling hundreds of thousands of active members. We understand how to design the commercial mechanics before designing the custom platform.
This pays off when return visits already drive revenue.
Everything on the left should already be true for your practice or health system. Even one thing on the right, and a custom program is the wrong spend right now.
A fit
Return visits already drive your revenue: dental, optometry, or physiotherapy recall, or a wellness brand that needs regular bookings.
Enough patient volume for a program to move real revenue, with an EHR or practice management system to integrate against.
You want to reward clinically beneficial behaviour, recall visits, preventive care, wellness goals, not just spend.
Not a fit
Multiple locations running different, unconnected EHR or practice management systems.
Occasional, one-off treatments with no clinical reason for patients to return on a schedule.
No budget for a custom build.
The first decision is not what to build.
It is whether software is the right answer at all. We use four possible recommendations before discussing a development scope.
- 01
Buy
Use a loyalty platform when its earn mechanics and HIPAA handling fit the clinical rhythm.
- 02
Repair
Keep the current recall process when patients return on schedule and the front desk holds it together. Start with evidence: what the lapse rate actually costs.
- 03
Build
Own the programme when earn must trigger on clinical events and member data must meet HIPAA from day one. Start with the recall appointment.
- 04
Wait
Do not build rewards before the clinical rhythm is understood. A punch card that fills in four years helps nobody.
Not sure which path is yours? Bring it to a 30-minute call. Leave with the answer in writing.
What we build
A member platform that reads the clinical calendar.
What patients see is a points balance and a recall nudge. What runs underneath aligns the reward with the behaviour that is good for them.
Visit-based earn from your PMS or EHR
Earn triggers configured against appointment completion events from your practice management system or EHR, with no front desk involvement, the patient completes their appointment, the system fires an event, and the account is credited automatically. Earn rates are configurable by appointment type, and a patient's account spans every location in your network.
Preventive care incentive programs
Bonus earn mechanics built around clinical prevention goals: annual checkups earn at a higher rate than reactive care, vaccination schedules reward milestone completion, and health screenings for mammogram, colorectal, eye, and dental hygiene earn on the recommended schedule. Earn rates are modelled against your appointment data and prevention goals before launch.
Wellness challenge programs
Configurable challenge mechanics for wellness brands and health system programs: step challenges with daily targets and weekly leaderboards, weight management with milestone rewards, quit-smoking streaks with rising reward tiers, mental health mood logging, and annual health goal tracking. Challenges are configured in the admin panel without a code deployment.
Patient retention programs for recall practices
Designed specifically for dental, optometry, and physiotherapy practices where recall frequency drives revenue. Recall rewards make rescheduling immediately after a visit feel financially rational, lapsed-patient reactivation targets those who have not attended in 12 or 18 months, and family account linking covers children's appointments under a parent's membership.
Member data handling built for HIPAA-regulated PHI
PHI encrypted at rest and in transit, with Business Associate Agreements signed with every infrastructure vendor before PHI flows to them. Role-based access and a complete audit trail control who sees member data, and no PHI reaches third-party analytics or marketing tools without a signed BAA. The compliance architecture is documented before development starts and reviewed by your legal team.
Member app and patient-facing portal
Branded iOS and Android apps with your visual identity showing points balance, appointment history, reward catalogue, and challenge progress. Push notifications cover appointment reminders, earn confirmations, challenge milestones, and reward expiry, and patients can book their recall appointment from within the app via deep link to your PMS.
Every one of these is modelled against your own appointment data before launch, not shipped as a template earn rate.
A healthcare program we shipped
Bella Skin Institute, a medical spa loyalty program.
Dr. Anna Guanche's board-certified dermatology practice in Calabasas, California. A medical spa membership is the nearest neighbour to a dental or wellness recall program: treatments run on a clinical cadence, and the reward has to earn the next visit rather than the last sale.
- Concept to launch
- 12 weeks
- iOS and Android from a single Flutter codebase
- QR earn at checkout
- Under 15 sec
- Points credited without slowing the front desk
- Expiry reminders
- 28 and 7-day
- Timed to pull the next booking forward before points lapse
We tuned the earn and expiry to a real three-to-six-month treatment gap, not a template rate. The mechanics that reinforce a dermatology visit are the same ones that reinforce a dental recall or a wellness rebooking.
Acquisition fills the schedule once. Retention fills it on a rhythm.
Tell us your recall rate, your appointment mix, and the preventive-care goals you want to move. We design the commercial mechanics before the platform.
How it works
From clinical calendar to live program.
Discovery and compliance come first, mechanics are modelled against your own data, and earn is wired to the appointment.
- Step 0101
Discovery and compliance architecture
We assess the integration approach for your EHR or practice management system and produce the compliance architecture document, reviewed by your legal team before any development starts. Every platform is scoped before pricing.
- Step 0202
Mechanics design
Earn rules, preventive care incentives, and tier structures modelled against your own appointment data, so the clinical goal and the commercial goal line up before any code is written.
- Step 0303
Build, integrate, and launch
Earn triggered on appointment-completion events from your PMS or EHR, tested against real appointment flows, and credited to the member account without any front desk step.
Work the recall math before you build
The return on a patient retention program is not a mystery. It is three numbers: the recall rate you have now, the rate a well-priced reward can realistically move it to, and the revenue a recovered visit is worth. Work it in that order and you know whether a custom build pays for itself.
Take a dental group as a worked example. Say 40 percent of patients book their six-month recall before they leave the chair, and the rest drift into reactivation. If a recall reward priced to feel worth it lifts that pre-booking rate to 55 percent, every hundred patients locks in fifteen more recalls per cycle. Multiply by two cycles a year and the average value of a hygiene visit, and that is the program's gross contribution. You subtract the build cost once, because you own the platform outright with no per-member fee, and the recovered visits keep compounding after that.
Put your own recall rate, your own visit value, and your own patient count through that same structure. If the recovered visits do not clear the one-time build inside roughly 18 to 30 months, a custom program is the wrong spend right now, and we will say so on the call.
Where you land in the cost range depends on scope, not negotiation:
- Patient retention program
- Visit-based earn from the PMS, a mobile app, and a basic rewards catalogue, for a dental group or allied health practice.
- Wellness engagement platform
- Challenge mechanics, device integration, and health goal tracking for a wellness brand or health system.
- Health system loyalty program
- EHR integration, preventive care incentives, multi-practice support, and advanced member analytics.
What it costs
One platform, scoped per project.
Visit-based earn, preventive care incentives, and the PHI data handling underneath, scoped to your practice or health system.
Member loyalty platforms charge per member and hold your data. This is a project you own outright. Start with the core earn mechanic, then expand the program as adoption grows, without paying a vendor per member along the way.
Starting investment
Starts at $10000
Scoped before pricing, with full source code ownership, no per-member fees, and no platform dependency. Launch a validated v1 with visit-based earn wired to one PMS, prove that recall rebooking moves, then layer in preventive care and wellness as the program grows. After a 30-minute call, you get a written build, buy, repair, or wait recommendation plus first-phase direction. Free, whether or not you build with us.
Ownership
Full source code ownership. The platform, the app, and your member data are yours, with no per-member fees and no platform dependency.
Privacy by design
The compliance architecture is documented before development starts and reviewed by your legal team. PHI is encrypted at rest and in transit, with a signed Business Associate Agreement from every infrastructure vendor before PHI flows to them.
Traditional points loyalty or membership
| Traditional points loyalty | Membership | |
|---|---|---|
| Revenue effect | Rarely moves revenue on its own | Generates MRR and ARR with forecastable cash flow |
| How it is sold | Points and rewards | Practices pitch every patient at the front desk with scripted enrollment |
| Working set | Points loyalty | Preventive-care rewards, wellness gamification, health-activity payouts, and subscription bundles |
Proof
What clients say about working with RaftLabs
Three-year average engagement. Founders and operators describing the work in their own words. No marketing varnish.
Work with us
Tell us where the work is stuck.
Bring the rough workflow, half-built product, or messy brief. We will map the smallest useful first move, then send scope, timeline, and price in plain English.
- Scope and cost agreed before work starts. No surprises. No obligation.
- Working prototype within 3 weeks of kickoff.
- Pay by milestone. You see progress before each invoice.
- 60-day post-launch warranty. Bug fixes, UI tweaks, and deployment support. No retainer.
- All conversations are NDA-protected.
Common questions
Two things make healthcare loyalty genuinely different. First, the earn trigger is a clinical event: an appointment, a health screening, a vaccination, not a purchase. The platform receives a signal from your EHR or practice management system at appointment completion and credits the account without front desk involvement. Second, the earn behaviour has clinical value: you are rewarding behaviour that is good for the patient, so the program design has to align the clinical goal with the commercial goal.
Yes. We integrate with Epic, Cerner, and Athenahealth via FHIR R4 for health system and hospital loyalty programs. For dental practices, we integrate with Dentrix, Eaglesoft, and Curve Dental via their API layers. For allied health and wellness platforms, we integrate with Cliniko, Nookal, and Mindbody. The integration trigger is appointment completion: the PMS fires a webhook when an appointment is marked complete, the loyalty platform receives it, applies the earn rules, and credits the patient's account without any front desk action. We assess the specific integration approach during discovery based on your system and the data flows required.
Preventive care incentives reward patients for completing appointments or health actions with clinical value: bonus earn on annual checkups, vaccination completion rewards, screening completions, and new-patient onboarding sequences. Earn rates run higher than standard visit earn, because the rewarded behavior is clinically more valuable and patients are less motivated to do it unprompted. We model earn rates against your appointment data before launch.
Step challenges are the most common: daily step target, weekly step goal, or multi-week challenge with a leaderboard for competitive engagement. Weight management programs with weekly weigh-in logging, progress tracking, and milestone rewards for reaching defined targets. Quit smoking programs with streak mechanics (days smoke-free, verified by self-report or connected device data) and increasing reward tiers for longer streaks. Mental health programmes with mood logging, therapy session completion, and habit-building challenges. Annual health goal programs where patients set health goals at the start of the year and earn points for completing quarterly check-ins against those goals. Challenge mechanics are configurable in the admin panel without a code deployment.
The compliance architecture document is produced before development starts and reviewed by your legal team. That means PHI encrypted at rest (AES-256) and in transit (TLS 1.3); Business Associate Agreements with every infrastructure vendor before PHI flows to them; role-based access so staff see only the member data their role requires; a complete audit trail of every PHI access event; and no PHI in third-party analytics SDKs, push notification platforms, or marketing tools that do not have signed BAAs. We design all of these into the platform architecture before development begins.
The bright line is OIG's nominal-value threshold: 15 dollars per item, 75 dollars annual aggregate per beneficiary, from the beneficiary-inducement statute. Free health screening for loyalty points is permissible; points for referrals that lead to expensive procedures raise red flags. Consult legal counsel on the Anti-Kickback Statute before launch. Clear policies on how patient data is collected, used, and stored come before any mechanic. Patients are not shoppers making discretionary purchases: their loyalty cannot and should not be bought through discounts. It has to be earned through trust. Position the program as health-first engagement, not retail points.
Membership is the new loyalty. Traditional points loyalty rarely moves revenue on its own; membership generates MRR and ARR with forecastable cash flow. Subscription fatigue matters less when the membership is personal and saves money: practices pitch every patient at the front desk with scripted enrollment. The working set: preventive-care rewards (annual screenings, vaccinations, smoking-cessation enrollment), wellness gamification (steps, hydration, meditation minutes), health-activity payouts for check-ups, screenings, immunizations, subscription bundles. The recall she booked before she left the chair: that is the retention mechanic.
Data handling built for HIPAA-regulated PHI. Full data portability: POS add-ons lock stamp history, the switching cost nobody mentions. Stamp history that cannot be exported dies when you leave the vendor, so exportable customer data and reward balances are a buying criterion. No customer app install: wallet-based cards. Ability to run alongside existing POS without integration. Three numbers to measure: enrollment rate (share of transactions producing a new card), redemption rate (share of earned rewards used), and member versus non-member visit frequency. If members visit more often than non-members, the program is doing its job.
Scope decides the price. A focused patient retention program covers visit-based earn from the PMS, a mobile app, and a basic rewards catalogue. A wellness engagement platform adds challenge mechanics, device integration, and health goal tracking. A health system loyalty program adds EHR integration, preventive care incentives, multi-practice support, and advanced member analytics. Cost drivers are the number of PMS or EHR integrations, whether you need native mobile apps or a web-only portal, the complexity of the challenge mechanics, and whether there is a member migration from an existing platform. Every platform is scoped before pricing.