At Chiron, we believe that retention is the foundation of success in digital health — not just for user engagement but for proving clinical impact, securing funding, and scaling beyond early adopters.

Our work isn’t just about improving retention metrics. It’s about ensuring digital health solutions create real, lasting impact — so patients stay engaged long enough to see results, companies can prove their value to investors, and health outcomes are improved at scale.

Why This Matters to Us

For Jens Stensgaard Jakobsen, founder of Chiron, the problem of retention in digital health is more than just a business challenge — it’s a personal mission.

After working with countless digital health startups, Jens kept seeing the same pattern: Great health solutions that users abandoned too soon. These weren’t bad products. They were well-researched, well-designed, and had the potential to make a real difference.

But they were missing a system for keeping users engaged long enough to experience results.

Again and again, he saw founders and product teams struggle — not because they lacked vision, but because they didn’t have a structured approach to retention.

That’s why he created The Sticky Patients Framework — a proven, step-by-step system for fixing retention, driving engagement, and ensuring digital health solutions succeed long-term.

The Story Behind Fixing
Retention in Digital Health

“If you can’t prove engagement, you can’t prove clinical outcomes, secure funding, or scale beyond early adopters.”

  • Going beyond vanity metrics to understand user psychology and behavior.

    Most digital health startups track retention, but few understand what’s truly driving it—or what’s causing users to leave. A retention rate or churn percentage alone doesn’t tell you why users disengage.

    At Chiron, we go beyond vanity metrics and take a behavior-first approach to diagnosing drop-off points. Using a mix of:
    ✅ User journey mapping – Identifying critical moments where engagement breaks down.
    ✅ Behavioral segmentation – Understanding different user types and their retention risks.
    ✅ Qualitative insights – Uncovering the emotions, motivations, and frustrations that shape engagement.

    This data-driven, user-centered approach allows us to pinpoint precisely what’s stopping users from forming long-term habits—so we can fix it at the source.

  • Using behavior science, habit formation, and personalized interventions.

    Retention isn’t about forcing users to stay—it’s about making engagement feel natural. If users have to actively remember to engage with a digital health tool, they probably won’t.

    That’s why we design engagement systems that fit seamlessly into users’ lives, making habit formation intuitive, rewarding, and effortless.

    We apply:
    ✅ Frictionless action design – Ensuring that key user actions are simple, timely, and seamlessly embedded in their existing routines.
    ✅ Reinforcement loops – Creating natural trigger-action-reward cycles that encourage repeated engagement without feeling forced.
    ✅ Contextual nudges – Delivering the right prompts, at the right time, based on real user behavior—so interactions feel relevant and useful.

    By embedding scientifically backed engagement mechanisms, we transform one-time users into long-term participants—without relying on constant reminders or intrusive notifications.

  • Scaling engagement without relying on costly manual efforts.

    Retention at scale isn’t just about doing the right things — it’s about making those things repeatable, personalized, and automated.

    For digital health companies looking to engage thousands (or millions) of users, manual engagement isn’t sustainable. That’s why we help startups implement automation and AI-driven personalization to drive long-term engagement at scale.

    We focus on:
    ✅ AI-driven behavioral triggers – Dynamically adjusting interventions based on user behavior.
    ✅ Personalized content delivery – Ensuring users receive relevant, timely nudges based on their engagement history.
    ✅ Reactivation campaigns – Using smart automation to bring back users before they fully disengage.

    By leveraging AI and automation, digital health companies can engage more users, more effectively, with less manual effort—while keeping retention high.

At Chiron, we don’t believe in retention quick fixes. Instead, we help digital health startups: