Digital Health Metrics

Patient engagement and access

Patient portal adoption rate — registration, activation, and active use; three different rates too often conflated as one
Telehealth visit rate — the share of care delivered remotely, and why video and telephone should never be reported as one number
Appointment no-show rate — the oldest operational metric in healthcare, and one of the best-evidenced targets for digital reminders
Patient engagement consistency rate — how regularly a patient interacts with a digital tool over time, as distinct from whether they have used it at all
User retention rate — the cohort retention curve that separates a product with a sustainable use pattern from one riding a wave of novelty
DAU/MAU stickiness ratio — the standard product-analytics measure of engagement intensity across a whole user base
Patient Net Promoter Score — the widely used, and widely criticized, single-question satisfaction metric
System Usability Scale score — a standardised 10-item questionnaire quantifying how usable a piece of software actually is

Clinical alert override rate — the standard signal for alert fatigue in clinical decision support
Digital referral turnaround time — the process metric that shows whether an e-referral system is actually saving time
Time to intervention — how quickly a clinical team responds to an automated health alert
Bed-day reduction — inpatient bed days saved by shifting recovery to a virtual ward, always reported alongside a safety metric

Biometric improvement rate — the share of patients achieving a clinically meaningful change in a tracked biometric such as HbA1c or BMI
Biometric stabilization rate — sustained control within a target range, as distinct from a one-off improvement
Triage routing accuracy — whether an AI or digital triage tool correctly routes a patient to the right level of care
Medication adherence rate — the proportion of days a patient had access to their medication as prescribed
Hospital readmission rate — the metric most directly tied to payer economics and value-based care contracts
ePROM completion rate — the completion rate for electronic patient-reported outcome measures, and why a declining rate can itself be a clinical signal

True customer acquisition cost — the fully loaded cost of acquiring one new patient, commonly undercounted by 30-50%
LTV to CAC ratio — lifetime value against true acquisition cost; 3:1 is the widely cited sustainable baseline
Marketing efficiency ratio — total revenue over total marketing spend, an independent check against platform-reported ROAS

Digital access rate — the precondition metric for every other digital health measure in this book
Digital literacy rate — whether patients who do have access can actually use it unaided

Physician burnout rate — tracked alongside clinician-facing digital tool burden, since badly designed software is a documented contributor
Device uptime rate — the foundational infrastructure metric underneath every remote monitoring programme

Cost per episode of care — the standard unit of financial comparison in value-based care contracts
Emergency department diversion rate — patient contacts safely redirected away from the ED, always reported alongside a missed-emergency safety metric
Return on investment (ROI) and value on investment (VOI) — whether a digital investment paid for itself financially, and whether it was worth doing accounting for everything that matters

RE-AIM framework — Reach, Effectiveness, Adoption, Implementation, and Maintenance; five dimensions rather than one metric
WHO Digital Health Assessment Framework — WHO's guidance for assessing feasibility, safety, and equity across national-scale deployments
ISO/TS 82304-2 — the international technical specification behind most health and wellness app quality labels