They never called. They couldn't tell if you'd take them.
A clinic's real loss is not the call that rings out. It is the call that never happens — someone finds you, cannot work out whether you are accepting new patients or whether you take their plan, and quietly moves on to the next clinic. You never hear about it, so it never gets fixed.
Use your patient value, not a benchmark.
A new patient is worth wildly different amounts to a dental office, a physio clinic and a massage studio, so there is no figure worth quoting you. Put your own in.
First visit plus the follow-ups that usually come with it. Not lifetime — one year, so the number stays defensible.
Genuinely new, not returning patients rebooking.
Your estimate. The ones who looked, could not get an answer to the obvious question, and went elsewhere.
Not all of that is recoverable — some of those people were never going to book anywhere. But the ones who left because a question went unanswered are the cheapest patients you will ever win back.
Two questions decide it, and most clinic sites answer neither.
Are you accepting new patients? And do you work with my insurance? Someone with a sore tooth at ten at night is not browsing your philosophy of care — they are trying to find out, in about eight seconds, whether contacting you is worth the effort.
When the page does not say, the safe assumption is no. So they close the tab and open the next clinic, and you never learn that it happened. That is the difference between a clinic site and a barber's: the barber loses a booking, you lose the enquiry before it exists.
A site that answers first.
Three jobs, in the order they decide whether someone contacts you.
Accepting new patients, in plain sight
Stated on the page, not buried in a paragraph — and easy for your front desk to switch off when you are full, so it is never out of date. The clinics that say it clearly get contacted by people who would otherwise assume the answer was no.
Which plans you work with, what a first visit costs
The insurers you direct-bill, listed. What a first appointment involves and what it costs if someone is paying themselves. Not a price list for everything — just enough that nobody has to phone to find out whether they can afford to phone.
Booked at 11pm, in your calendar by morning
A live calendar with your real appointment types and lengths, per practitioner. Confirmation on booking, a reminder before the visit, and a link to reschedule rather than simply not appear.
On patient information, plainly
The booking takes a name, a contact, an appointment type and a time. It does not ask for health history, symptoms or anything clinical, and it is not a patient record system — your practice software stays where it is and this does not replace it.
That is a deliberate limit. Handling health information properly in Ontario is a serious obligation, and a booking form is the wrong place to start collecting it. If your clinic needs intake forms with clinical detail, that belongs in software built and certified for it, and I will say so rather than sell you something that is not.
What it costs.
$5,400 flat · The Booking Block
A custom site with real booking on it. Live in about two weeks. Half to start, the balance when it goes live, and no fee per appointment.
Optional care plan at $210/month if you would rather I keep it hosted, backed up, monitored and edited — including flipping "accepting new patients" on and off as your books change. Cancellable any month after the first six.
If you do not need online booking and only need to be found and phoned, The Signature Site is $4,800.
When this is not worth it.
- You are not accepting new patients and do not intend to be. Everything above is about a question you would be answering "no" to.
- Your patients arrive almost entirely on physician referral. Referrers do not find you by search, and a booking page will not change where they send people.
- You are an associate in someone else's clinic. You do not control the site, and this is the owner's decision.
- Your practice software already has a booking widget your patients use happily. Adding a second front door creates two calendars and one argument.
Send me your numbers.
Tell me your discipline, whether you are taking new patients, and roughly how many you add a month. I will tell you honestly whether this moves the needle — including when it will not. No call, no pitch, no follow-up sequence.