Cost per Patient Acquisition (CPA) is a strategic metric healthcare organizations use to gauge the total average resources spent to acquire a new patient. It is essentially performed to improve marketing techniques and direct them towards an ROI (return on investment) focused approach to ascertain, and eventually maximize, patient acquisition and retention rates, as well as their lifetime value.

Calculating CPA:

CPA is computed by dividing the sum of total sales and marketing costs with the total number of new patients acquired in a given time frame. This method factors in total sales along with the costs disbursed in marketing to get potential patients into visiting website, social media engagements, sharing blog post, etc.

Read More: Key Tips for an Exceptional Practice Manager

Cost abridgement begins with calculating CPA correctly in the first place. In order to achieve a positive ROI, practices need to set a promising target which can serve as a benchmark for the practice’s sales and marketing efforts.

Optimizing content:

Page visited, ads clicked, social media engagements, and so on, are just piece of cake. The real work is to be able to manage and convert the viewers into customers. Practices can effectively do so by generating high quality content and ad campaigns after performing psychographic analysis of customer pool and creating buyer personas for their ideal patients. Content, including blog posts, images, videos, etc., is singularly the most reliable way to make sure your online presence appeals to prospective patients.

Maximizing conversion rates:

Another way to cut down on patient acquisition costs is to employ marketing strategies that yield maximum conversions rates. It means that for every penny spent you almost always get a positive return, as in, by converting potentials into customers. Conversion rates can be maximized by optimizing your published content to cater the needs and preferences of your targeted audience, as explained earlier.

Read More: Tricks to Reduce Cost in Your Private Practice

Time for CPA reimbursement:

This metric comes in handy when practices aim to achieve a particular return on investment within a certain temporal window. It outlines the procedural efficiency by evaluating the time it takes for the practice to earn back the CPA it spent for acquiring new patients.