Ready for something a bit controversial? Patient outcomes don’t matter.
Before anyone starts typing an angry LinkedIn comment, I’m obviously not saying outcomes don’t matter clinically. They matter enormously. I’m saying they don’t matter nearly as much as clinic owners think when it comes to winning new patients and building a successful business. Clinicians treat outcomes as the most important thing in a successful clinic, and they’re one of the least. If I was wrong, the clinics with the best clinicians and the best outcomes would also be the biggest, fastest-growing and most profitable. They’re not. The owner might convince themselves they are, but we all know it’s not true.
If outcomes really sold clinics, every patient would spend hours comparing clinical evidence before booking. They don’t. They compare Google reviews, opening hours, whether you can book online, how quickly someone answers the phone, whether it’s close to work and whether the place looks professional. Clinicians imagine patients compare clinical quality. Patients compare buying experiences.
Think about how you choose a dentist, solicitor or accountant. You don’t read their academic papers. You don’t audit their technical ability. You look at reviews, recommendations, convenience and whether they seem trustworthy. Patients buy physio in exactly the same way.
And a huge part of that is people. It’s why I bang on about team pages. A good team page shows off who your people actually are, what they’re like, what they enjoy outside of work, because people connect with people, and a patient choosing between two clinics will pick the one where the physio looks like someone they’d be happy to spend half an hour in a room with. We choose businesses on all sorts of things. It’s rarely outcomes.
Nobody books a plumber because he promises not to flood the kitchen. Nobody books a restaurant because it promises not to poison you. That’s just the bare minimum you expect from anyone taking your money, and physio outcomes sit in exactly the same category. A good clinical outcome isn’t your USP. It’s the starting point.
I watched exactly this on a panel at Coherent recently. The session was about making your business attractive to sell, and there were three businesses on stage. Two aesthetics clinics, one called Skinjevity or something close to it, the other I’ve already forgotten, and Pure Sports Med in the middle with Simon speaking for them.
The aesthetics clinics called their patients customers, every single time, and they never once mentioned outcomes. The result was taken as read, assumed, boring, not worth a sentence. What they talked about was the experience. The space, the greeting, how the whole thing feels from first enquiry to the follow-up. Simon talked almost entirely about outcomes, systems, demographics, targeting. The split on that stage is the entire problem with MSK marketing.
Before someone becomes your patient, they’re completely incapable of judging whether you’re a better clinician than the practice five minutes down the road. They literally can’t know. So they judge everything they can see instead.
And quite honestly, most patients can’t reliably judge whether they’ve just seen a brilliant physio or an average one. They know whether they liked you. They know whether you listened. They know whether they felt reassured. They know whether they feel better. But separating genuine clinical expertise from confidence, personality and good communication? That’s incredibly difficult for someone without clinical training.
And remember, MSK isn’t dentistry. Walk into a dentist with a sore tooth and you expect it fixed there and then. They can pull it, inject it, sort it on the spot. Walk into an MSK clinic with chronic pain and it can take months to fix, if it ever gets fixed at all. It’s another reason outcomes carry less weight than clinicians think. Leave the dentist with a sore tooth and you’ll complain. Leave a physio with a sore leg and that’s just part of the game.
Which leads to the marketing problem. You cannot sell something someone hasn’t experienced yet. Before treatment, a patient can look at your building, your reviews, your brand, your photography, your booking process. They cannot evaluate whether you’ll reduce their pain by 68%. So when your entire pitch is the outcome, you’re selling the one thing that’s invisible at the point of purchase.
And most physio websites aren’t even written for patients. They’re written for other physios. Patients don’t care. Other physios do. The average patient doesn’t know what “biopsychosocial” means, doesn’t know what HCPC registration involves, and couldn’t tell you whether an MSc makes someone a better clinician. Yet clinic websites are full of exactly that, because they’re written to impress peers, not persuade patients. You’re marketing to the profession and wondering why the phone’s quiet.
It’s all wallpaper anyway. Differentiation only works if the customer notices it before they buy. Every clinic says personalised treatment, every clinic says expert clinicians, every clinic says tailored rehabilitation. When everyone claims it, it means nothing. I have never once heard a patient say “I chose you because your website said evidence-based.” Not once in all my years doing this. They say my friend loved it, or I got in quickly, or they actually answered the phone, or it looked nice.
Marketing gets someone in.
Clinical skill keeps them.
They’re different jobs. Acquisition and retention are not the same problem, and clinical excellence belongs almost entirely to the second one. Most clinics pour all their thinking into the retention side and then wonder why acquisition is hard.
And the outcome only gets remembered if the experience was good. Two clinics, both fix your shoulder. Clinic A, the reception’s rude, you wait twenty minutes, the forms are annoying, nobody smiles. Clinic B, there’s a decent coffee, reception knows your name, the appointment starts on time, you get a follow-up text the next day. Same shoulder. Guess which one gets the review. Nobody tells their mates “the outcome measures were fantastic.” They say “you’ve got to go there.”
Physios love pretending healthcare is fundamentally different from everything else people buy. It isn’t. Private healthcare is retail. People compare, judge, recommend, and leave because someone was rude to them, exactly like they do with restaurants and hairdressers and hotels. The clinics most obsessed with outcomes are often the ones delivering the worst experiences, because every spare pound goes on another assessment tool instead of reception training.
Ironically, the clinics that genuinely deliver brilliant outcomes often undersell themselves, because they assume everyone buys the way clinicians think. Meanwhile clinics with perfectly average outcomes but exceptional customer experience keep winning market share, because they’re easier to choose.
For whatever reason I’ve ended up on ChiroTok at the moment, and all I see is the most ridiculous treatments. Some genuinely crazy stuff, you wouldn’t believe half of it. Then I look up the clinic and they’re doing okay. Better than okay, some of them. And it’s not just chiros, it’s all sorts, I only name them because they’re the most entertaining right now. There is no way some of these places are getting decent patient outcomes, and plenty of them make an awful lot of money.
Your outcome still matters, obviously, a rubbish physio doesn’t get saved by nice candles. But patients don’t choose the clinic with the best outcome. They choose the clinic they believe will give them the best experience. Then they expect the outcome to be good as well.
