Attribution · 7 min read
Lead volume is a vanity number. Occupied beds and completed surgeries are the only figures a hospital board should compensate marketing against.
Published 2026-05-14
Almost every super-specialty hospital we diagnose arrives with the same dashboard: cost per lead, form-fills, click-through rate, cost per call. None of these numbers pay for an OT.
Rebuild the stack around three fields on the HIS admission record: admission source, first-touch campaign ID, and referring physician tag. When these three travel from CRM to HIS to billing, every rupee of ad spend traces to a scheduled surgery.
Optimising for the cheapest lead pushes budget to broad OP queries — general physician, fever, routine consultation — which crowd out the high-intent super-specialty searches (CABG cost, robotic prostatectomy second opinion, TAVR eligibility). Your CPL falls; your OT calendar empties.
Three KPIs, reviewed monthly with the Chief of Surgery: CAC per confirmed IP admission, ROAS against billed IP revenue, and lead-to-admit SLA. Everything else is decoration.
