TL;DR
Use attended evaluation cohorts and verified collected revenue to review PT acquisition spending. Separate agency fees, media, clinic labor and care delivery costs. Keep pending collections and incomplete cohorts visible. Then test whether the practice has usable evaluation and follow-up capacity. The worksheet organizes a spending decision; it does not predict return on investment or prescribe more visits.
Define what the practice is trying to afford
“Cost per new patient” is incomplete if the vendor means a form submission and the owner means someone who attends an evaluation. Agree the acquisition unit before discussing affordability. Here, the proposed unit is a new-to-clinic person with an attended initial evaluation under the clinic's approved history rule.
Choose a cohort entry period, a collection observation cutoff and the service and payment arrangements included. Ask billing to distinguish money actually received from billed charges, outstanding amounts, refunds and adjustments. Do not substitute the clinic's listed evaluation fee for collections without checking what happened.
For U.S. Medicare Part B outpatient PT, Medicare describes coverage for medically necessary services for eligible people and notes that amounts owed depend on factors including other insurance, provider charges and setting. Those are reasons to avoid treating a universal published price as your clinic's realized revenue. Medicare's PT coverage information. This article does not establish billing eligibility, coverage or reimbursement for any individual.
Fill the contribution worksheet from actual records
Have finance or the responsible billing lead approve the extraction method. Keep identifiable encounter and payment records in the clinic's authorized systems. Use only the approved summary for a marketing discussion, with any disclosure assessment completed for the actual recipient.
| Symbol | Enter from the clinic's approved evidence | Boundary to preserve |
|---|---|---|
| A | Attended initial evaluations meeting the acquisition definition ___ | Exclude returning relationships under the agreed rule |
| R | Net collected revenue tied to the defined cohort and cutoff ___ | Keep pending balances outside realized collections |
| V | Delivery costs included under the finance-approved cost method ___ | State labor, supplies and other included costs explicitly |
| M | Media cost assigned to the test ___ | Avoid mixing unrelated campaigns |
| F | Agency and other purchased acquisition work assigned to the test ___ | Disclose setup allocation and excluded work |
| L | Clinic acquisition labor cost under the approved method ___ | Include relevant intake and owner effort without double counting |
| H | Contribution the practice wants to retain for overhead and its business needs ___ | This is an owner planning choice, not an industry benchmark |
Use actual amounts or leave fields blank. A missing collection reconciliation should not be filled with an optimistic expected visit series. If the financial system cannot isolate the cohort reliably, state that limit and review the broader business result separately.
Apply the formulas only after the definitions agree
Acquisition spend: S = M + F + L. This adds the named acquisition cost categories. Check that the same labor or setup cost is not included in more than a single category.
Observed acquisition cost per attended evaluation: S / A. Use this only when A is positive and the spend and attendance populations are compatible. Show unavailable when the denominator is empty. If source attribution cannot connect the cohort to the test, call it a broader period calculation rather than campaign-specific cost.
Observed contribution before acquisition: C = R − V. This subtracts the included delivery costs from net collections for the same cohort and cutoff. It is not net profit when overhead or other expenses are outside V.
Planning comparison: S ≤ C − H. This asks whether acquisition spending fits within the observed contribution after the owner-selected retained amount. It is a management comparison, not an equation predicting future demand. A negative available amount does not justify increasing treatment volume to make the arithmetic work.
Do not label the resulting comparison lifetime value. Incomplete episodes, unresolved collections and costs outside the worksheet limit what it says. Ask the finance owner to describe those limits beside the result, and retain the calculation version when the cost method changes.
Put capacity alongside the arithmetic
Document actual evaluation availability by clinician, location and appointment type. Then have operations describe the capacity to support clinically appropriate ongoing care if evaluations lead to it. The marketing team should not derive a follow-up schedule or care plan from a revenue target.
A clinic can have unfilled hours that are unusable for the promoted evaluation: the wrong clinician, location, appointment format or time window. Record the constraint and the person who can resolve it. Do not turn a global utilization percentage into permission to promote every service.
Use the scope worksheet to compare the purchased work and the availability guide to align the public action with real access. The acquisition economics decision needs both an affordable purchase and a service pathway operations can support.
Record continue, repair or wait
End with the evidence cutoff, included costs, known gaps, actual capacity and next decision owner. Continue a test when the clinic accepts the observed economics and can support the offer. Repair a measurement or administrative defect when that prevents interpretation. Wait for a defined collection milestone when the cohort is financially immature.
GetPatients has a commercial interest in healthcare visibility services. Apply the same cost definitions and evidence requirements to its proposals. No worksheet, agency or channel label guarantees collected revenue, suitable patients or profitable growth.
Frequently asked questions
Can we use billed revenue while collections are pending?
Report it separately with its actual status. Do not rename it collected revenue. Decide with finance what evidence is sufficient for the spending question and make the remaining uncertainty visible.
Should every new relationship be assigned a full care series value?
Use actual care and collection records within the defined observation period. Do not assume a standard series to justify acquisition spending. Clinical decisions remain independent of the marketing budget.
Is contribution per evaluation the same as a maximum bid?
No. The worksheet has defined exclusions, observation limits and an owner-selected retained amount. A bidding decision also needs an appropriate attribution method and an actual budget decision. It cannot be read directly from an incomplete cohort.