8 tips to lower patient acquisition costs

Do you know how much it costs to attract a new patient to your practice? If the answer is “no,” you might be overspending on your patient acquisition. Your patient acquisition cost, or PAC, is one of the foremost measures of your practice’s profitability. Since the costs of acquiring new patients are often so robust – from marketing to overhead expenses, they can add up quickly, and quickly eat into your profit margins.

Because your PAC is so important to potential profitability, it’s crucial for physician practices to ensure that this figure remains lower than a patient’s lifetime value (PLV), or how much they are expected to spend with you during their lifetime as a patient. As a general rule of thumb, practices should widen the margin between the two and aim for at least a 3:1 PLV to PAC ratio.

So how can you get everything to line up properly? Marketing is by far the largest cost component of patient acquisition, which is why the key to achieving that golden ratio is to do your due diligence and spend efficiently on your marketing efforts.

Here are eight ways you can do this.