Patient acquisition cost in medical tourism is everything an agency spends to bring one patient to the clinic — ads, coordinator time and tools — divided by the patients who actually arrived, not by inquiries or deposits. With the example numbers pre-filled here (200 inquiries a month, 40% qualified, 75% quoted, 20% paying a deposit, 10% cancelling, 5% not showing up), the funnel produces 10.3 arrived patients for $5,125: $499 per arrived patient against $26 per inquiry. The calculator takes your own numbers, finds the step where a few percentage points add the most arrivals, and runs the funnel backwards: for any number of arrived patients a month it returns the inquiries you need, the monthly budget and the highest cost per inquiry you can afford at your commission. The pre-filled values are placeholders, not market data.
Tool
Most agencies know what an inquiry costs and what a commission pays. Far fewer know what one arrived patient costs — the number that decides whether growth makes money. This calculator turns one month of funnel numbers into that figure, shows where the money leaks, and runs the funnel backwards from a patient target. For the profit on a single case once the patient is there — price, commission rate, finance cost, the cost of a cancelled case — use the case economics calculator.
The calculator is at the top of this page as a funnel. Six stages from inquiries to completed cases narrow with your numbers. Each stage row holds its own conversion rate and the coordinator hours spent per case, shows what one unit at that stage costs, and drains what you lose; the weakest step glows. Beside the funnel, the reverse planner takes the number of arrived patients you want and returns the inquiries, the budget and the highest cost per inquiry you can afford. Below it, a lever table ranks which single percentage adds the most arrivals, and a channel board compares paid social, search ads, messaging referrals, partner agencies and fairs with your own figures.
Patient acquisition cost (CAC) is the total cost of bringing patients to the clinic divided by the number of patients who arrived. The cost has three parts: media (ad spend, platform fees, referral rewards), coordinator time (the hours spent at each stage multiplied by the hourly cost of the person spending them) and tools (CRM, messaging numbers, translation, per month). The count is arrivals, because arrival is the moment treatment can begin and a commission becomes possible.
A deposit is a promise; an arrival is a patient. Between the two sit cancellations and no-shows, and their cost has already been spent: the ad, the calls, the quote, the booking work. Counting inquiries or deposits instead of arrivals makes acquisition look cheaper than it is.
Terms such as patient coordinator, cancellation policy and patient case are defined in the health tourism glossary.
These are the numbers the calculator opens with. They are round examples, not market data. 200 inquiries a month at $10 each is $2,000 of ads.
Coordinator time adds 227 hours × $12 = $2,725, tools and overhead $400, so the total is $5,125 for 10.3 arrived patients: $499 per arrived patient. Only $195 of that is ad spend; the all-in figure is more than double the ads-only one, and coordinator time alone is 53% of the total. At $900 commission per completed case, 9.7 completed cases earn $8,772: net $3,648, ROAS 4.4×, payback 1.7× and $356 net per arrived patient.
The lever table raises one rate at a time by the step you choose (3, 5 or 10 percentage points; a leak is lowered by the same amount), recomputes the month and ranks the results by the arrived patients each change adds. The winner is the bottleneck. Because arrivals are a product of the rates, the same number of points is worth most where the rate is lowest.
In the example, quote → deposit paid is the lowest rate. Moving it from 20% to 25% adds 2.6 arrived patients a month at the same ad spend and lowers the cost per arrived patient from $499 to $422. That is a ranking of sensitivity, not a forecast: whether 5 more points are achievable depends on your offer, your price and your market.
How many leads do I need? Divide the arrived patients you want by the share of inquiries that arrive: inquiries needed = target ÷ (qualified % × quote % × deposit % × (1 − cancelled %) × (1 − no-show %)). The budget is the inquiries needed × (cost per inquiry + coordinator cost per inquiry) + tools. The highest cost per inquiry you can afford is the commission an inquiry is expected to earn, minus the coordinator cost and the tools cost per inquiry; the planner also shows it for the share of the commission you want to keep.
With the example rates, 5.1% of inquiries arrive. A target of 10 arrived patients a month therefore needs about 195 inquiries (78 qualified, 58.5 quotes, 11.7 deposits) and a budget of $5,005. The highest cost per inquiry is $28 to break even and $19 while keeping 20% of the commission; the example $10 fits. Counts are expected values: plan a margin for months that run below average.
The channel board takes one month per channel: what you spent, the inquiries it produced, the patients who arrived and the coordinator hours it took. It shows the cost per inquiry, the share of inquiries that arrive, the cost per arrived patient on ads and fees alone and all-in, and what is left per arrived patient. Count partner fees and referral rewards as spend. The five pre-filled rows are examples that split the example month ($580, $487, $290, $510 and $434 per arrived patient); they say nothing about which channel is cheapest for you.
A paid channel often starts with a patient who knows little about you, so the first three stages tend to take many of the hours: qualifying, quoting, convincing. A fair or a B2B meeting starts from the other side. You meet the clinic or a partner agency, see the price list and the free capacity, and route patients you already hold. Two things change in the table: the cost moves from per-inquiry spend to time, travel and fees, and some early stages are done with a provider rather than with a patient. Neither guarantees patients. Track introductions, patients routed and arrivals in the same row and judge the channel after a few months, not after one event.
Agencies join Health onMESSE free: no stand fee, no subscription. Join as an agency to browse clinic and hospital profiles, request meetings and add a channel whose cost is mostly your own time, or read what agencies get.
A Harvard Business Review study published in March 2011 (Oldroyd, McElheran and Elkington) analysed about 1.25 million sales leads at 29 consumer and 13 business-to-business companies in the United States. Companies that contacted a lead within an hour were nearly seven times as likely to qualify it — to have a meaningful conversation with a key decision-maker — as companies that waited even one hour longer. The leads were not medical tourism patients, so read it as a reason to measure your own first-reply time and its effect on the first rate, not as a benchmark.
Inquiries often contain health details. Under the GDPR (Regulation (EU) 2016/679, Article 9) data concerning health is a special category that may be processed only on narrow grounds such as explicit consent, and Türkiye’s Law No. 6698 (KVKK), Article 6, treats health data as special-category data too. Directive 2002/58/EC, Article 13, allows e-mail direct marketing to individuals only with the recipient’s prior consent, with a narrow exception for a seller’s own similar products to existing customers. Advertising rules for health services differ by country: in Türkiye, Article 13 of the international health tourism regulation (Official Gazette of 26 April 2025, No. 32882) applies the Ministry of Health’s promotion rules to health facilities and intermediary organisations, as the authorization certificate guide explains. Check the rules of the market where the ad runs and of the country where treatment is delivered; this page is not legal advice.
Health onMESSE is an online trade fair for health tourism where agencies meet clinics, hospitals, hotels and other providers. Agencies join free: there is no stand fee and no subscription. For the funnel above, that makes the fair a channel whose cost is mainly hours, and one that begins with a provider who already has a price list. Pair it with the clinic due-diligence scorecard before you add a provider and the case timeline planner once a case is booked.
Clinic, hospital or hotel? Agencies are the channel for international patients. Exhibit at Health onMESSE to put your profile in front of them, or see what exhibitors get.
More planning tools for this fair are in the Health onMESSE tools directory, and the fair itself is at Health onMESSE.
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