A Simple Patient Acquisition Cost Worksheet for Allied Health Clinics

02 October 2026·5 min read

Quick answer: Patient acquisition cost is just total spend on a channel divided by the number of new patients it actually brought in over the same period — but most clinics get it wrong by only counting ad spend and ignoring staff time, or by crediting every new patient to whichever channel they remember clicking last. A simple worksheet, tracked monthly per channel, tells you which activities are actually worth the time and which ones just feel productive. 📈

Almost every clinic owner we talk to has a gut feeling about which marketing activity is "working." Almost none of them have actually done the maths. 💖 That's not a criticism — running a clinic leaves very little time for spreadsheets — but it means budget often keeps flowing to whatever's loudest or most recent, rather than whatever's genuinely cheapest per new patient.

What most clinics get wrong

The most common mistake is calculating one blended acquisition cost across all marketing activity, rather than breaking it down by channel. A blended number tells you almost nothing useful — it can't tell you whether Google Ads or your referral program is doing the heavy lifting. The second most common mistake is only counting hard costs like ad spend, and leaving out the actual time staff spend managing a channel, which for things like social media or referral follow-up can be the bigger cost by far.

The worksheet (set this up as one row per channel, per month):

Channel — e.g. Google Ads, GP referrals, Instagram, word of mouth, your website's organic search traffic.
Hard cost — actual spend: ad budget, agency fees, print costs, directory listing fees.
Time cost — hours spent by staff managing that channel in the month, multiplied by a reasonable hourly rate for that person's time.
Total cost — hard cost + time cost.
New patients from this channel — count only genuinely new patients, asked at intake "how did you hear about us?" and logged consistently.
Acquisition cost per channel — Total cost ÷ New patients from this channel.
Average patient value (optional but useful) — average revenue per new patient across their first 3-6 months, so you can compare acquisition cost against what a patient is actually worth, not just the cost in isolation.

Physiotherapy clinic running Google Ads and a GP referral relationship: Google Ads might cost $900 in spend plus 3 hours of admin time to produce 6 new patients, while the GP referral relationship costs nothing but a quarterly coffee catch-up and produces 4 new patients — on paper, the referral channel looks dramatically cheaper, but it's also far less scalable, which the worksheet alone won't tell you.

Psychology practice with an active Instagram account: if a practice manager spends 5 hours a month on content at $40/hour, that's $200 in time cost alone before any ad spend — if Instagram is only generating one or two new patients a month, the acquisition cost is much higher than it looks from the outside, even though the channel feels "free."

Dental practice with a directory listing and paid search running side by side: tracking both separately, rather than lumping "online marketing" into one line, is usually what reveals that one of the two is doing almost all the work while the other is quietly costing money for very little return.

How to actually set this up

Start the "how did you hear about us" question at intake if you're not already asking it — this is the data bottleneck for almost every clinic trying to do this calculation.
Build the worksheet in a basic spreadsheet, one tab per month or one row per channel per month — it doesn't need to be more sophisticated than that to be useful.
Estimate time cost honestly, even roughly — a rough number is still more accurate than leaving it out entirely.
Review quarterly, not weekly. Patient numbers per channel are usually too small each month to draw firm conclusions from a single month's data.
Compare acquisition cost against patient value, not against zero. A channel that costs more per patient can still be worth it if it brings in patients who stay longer or book more frequently.

💡 Don't cut a channel after one bad month. New patient numbers per channel are often small enough that one slow month can look like a trend when it's really just normal variation — give each channel at least a full quarter of data before deciding it isn't working.

Mistakes to avoid

Leaving staff time out of the calculation. A "free" channel that eats five hours a month of someone's time isn't actually free.
Relying on memory instead of asking at intake. "How did you hear about us" needs to be asked and logged every time, not estimated after the fact.
Comparing channels on cost alone, ignoring patient value. A cheaper channel that brings in patients who book once and never return isn't necessarily the better one.
Judging a channel on one month of data. Small patient numbers per channel mean monthly figures can swing a lot without anything actually changing.
Crediting every new patient to the last thing they remember. Many patients hear about a clinic from one source and are nudged to book by another — track the ones you can clearly attribute and treat the rest as a blended "unknown" category rather than forcing a guess.

Frequently asked questions

What's a "good" patient acquisition cost?

There's no single benchmark that applies across every clinic type and location — it depends heavily on your average patient value, how long patients typically stay with you, and local competition. The more useful comparison is channel against channel within your own clinic, not against an industry figure.

Do we need software to track this, or is a spreadsheet enough?

A spreadsheet is genuinely enough for most clinics, especially to start. Dedicated analytics or CRM tools can automate some of the tracking once you've outgrown manual entry, but they're not a prerequisite for getting useful numbers.

How do we count a patient who came from both a referral and an ad they saw?

Pick the source they name first when asked at intake, and don't overthink split attribution for a small clinic — the goal is a directionally useful number per channel, not a perfectly precise one. Perfect attribution usually isn't worth the admin time it costs to chase.

Should we include existing patients who come back, or only brand new patients?

This worksheet is specifically for acquisition cost, so only count genuinely new patients. Returning patient value is a separate, equally useful number, but mixing the two muddies both calculations.

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Written by

Kate, founder of Chronically Online

I help Gold Coast and Brisbane businesses grow with branding, websites and marketing that actually works.

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