There are two ways to find out where a clinic loses patients between the first message and the treatment chair. One is to take the numbers the owner already has and do the arithmetic. The other is to become a patient for an evening and watch what happens. We offer both, free, and they are built to be used in that order. This article is about why they are different and what each one is for.
Arithmetic on your own figures
The leak calculator asks for the numbers a clinic owner has or can estimate: how many enquiries arrive in a month, what one treated patient is worth across a full course of treatment, and three rates, from enquiry to booking, booking to visit, visit to treatment. It follows a month of enquiries through those steps, counts who was lost at each one, values each lost person at what they were realistically worth at that point, and puts a figure on the whole thing per month and per year. We describe how it does that in its own article.
What it gives you is a size. How big is the question, in your currency. Which of the three drops is the largest, which is plain arithmetic once the rates are in. And, often, one more thing: how many of the three rates you actually knew. The calculator treats "I don't know" as a real answer and turns the result into a range, and when that happens the page says so plainly: "That is the most common result we see — and it is the finding. You cannot fix a funnel you cannot see."
What it cannot give you is a cause. It does not know why patients drop out at the step where they drop out, and it does not pretend to. The page puts the limit in one line: "This is what your numbers say. The diagnostic is what your clinic actually does — we go through your enquiry process the way a patient would, and time what happens."
An observation of your clinic
The diagnostic starts where the calculator stops. Four steps:
- We enquire at your clinic the way a patient would.
- We time what happens: first reply, follow-up, booking.
- You walk us through your numbers on one short call.
- About a week later you get it in writing.
The difference is the first two steps. Nobody is asked to estimate anything. We send the enquiries, at the hours patients send them, in the languages patients use, and we record what comes back and when. The result is not what the clinic believes happens to an enquiry. It is what happened to ours.
That is also why the diagnostic needs no access to patient records. It observes the clinic from the outside, the way a patient does, and the written report is the clinic's to keep whether we work together afterwards or not.
Why the two disagree, and why that is the point
Put the calculator's figure next to the diagnostic's findings and they rarely tell the same story. That is not a flaw in either. It is the gap between the rates an owner carries in their head and the rates the clinic actually produces at nine on a Thursday evening.
A few examples of how the gap shows up, described rather than prescribed. An owner enters a booking rate from memory, and the diagnostic finds that enquiries arriving after closing time are not answered until the next working day, so the real rate at those hours is a different number altogether. An owner is sure the show-up rate is fine, and the diagnostic finds no confirmation goes out after a booking, so nobody knows the show-up rate at all. An owner did not know the go-ahead rate, and the written report is the first time anyone has counted it.
The calculator makes the owner's model of the clinic explicit. The diagnostic tests it. The difference between the two is the finding, and it is usually more specific than either would be on its own.
What neither of them includes
Both leave out, on purpose, something that is often a larger pool than any of the three drops: missed appointments from existing patients partway through a course of treatment. The calculator says so on its results page, and the diagnostic scopes it out so that the report stays about the enquiry path. It is a separate piece of work, and it comes after the enquiry leak is closed, not instead of it.
Neither of them makes a claim about what is achievable. The calculator's recovery slider is set by the visitor, from one to twenty percent, and shows what that share would be worth. It is a what-if, not a forecast. The diagnostic reports what we observed and what it costs per month, and if the findings do not justify any work, it says that, and no proposal follows.
Which to use first
The calculator, because it takes two minutes and costs nothing, not even an email, and because the act of answering it tells you which of your own numbers you do not have. Then the diagnostic, if the size of the question justifies a week of someone looking at it from the outside. If you reach the results page and the figure is small, you have learned something useful and spent two minutes. If it is not small, the next step is already on the page.