When did you last change your prices, and what did you base the change on?
If you’re like most clinic owners I speak to, the answer is some combination of what the clinic down the road charges, what you charged last year, and what felt about right. That is one way to do it for sure, but it is anything but ‘strategic’.
When I launched my clinic I basically did exactly that. It seemed sensible to me to not be priced too high against the competition, so I started there, but then raising prices always felt dangerous. I could imagine the potential patient screwing their nose up at the new rate and booking elsewhere and I’d rather have a booking than an empty diary.
Setting your appointment prices is one of the most impactful commercial decisions you can make so doing so on instinct, rather than evidence is silly. And the data to help you make the decision is usually sitting right under your nose in your PMS as long as you know where to look and what to do with it!
We’ve built the HMDG Pricing Engine. It’s free, it takes five minutes, and you can run it now here.
I’m deliberately not calling it a calculator, because most pricing calculators spit out a number and wish you luck. This doesn’t. You enter your real clinic data – utilisation, wait times, current prices, retention – and the engine models multiple pricing scenarios against it. You see the projected revenue impact, the likely effect on bookings, and the risk level of each move before you change anything. Every recommendation is calibrated against benchmark data from 715 UK MSK clinic owners across the UK, by region and discipline, primary data, collected directly from clinic owners.
Two things it does that I’ve never seen elsewhere:
First, it tells you when not to raise your headline price. If your initial assessment is already at market rate, the engine will often recommend raising only your follow-up. Patients comparison-shop the initial price; nobody shops follow-up rates, and that’s where most of your revenue actually sits. Highest impact, lowest risk.
Second, it tells you if pricing isn’t your biggest lever at all. Every report opens with a single line: the one thing most affecting your revenue right now. For some clinics that’s pricing. For others it’s retention, or wasted appointments, or a scheduling problem masquerading as strong demand. If holding your prices and fixing retention would earn you more, it says so.
And because knowing the right price and charging it are different problems, you also get a week-by-week implementation plan, including scripts for your front desk when patients ask about the change. It really doesn’t take long and the worst case scenario is you spend five minutes confirming your pricing is already right – which would put you in the minority.
Run your numbers here and if the results raise questions you’d like help with, get in touch!
