Every independent hormone and longevity clinic has an opinion about how well it handles a new patient reaching out. Almost none of them have a number.
There’s no shared, repeatable measurement of clinic responsiveness in this category — nothing like a Net Promoter Score, a credit score, or a page-load benchmark. So an owner has no way to know if his own front desk is ahead of the pack, behind it, or about average, short of guessing.
We think that’s a real gap, and we’re building the thing to fill it: a recurring, published response benchmark for hormone and longevity clinics, starting in Tampa, Florida, with more metros to follow.
What we actually do
The method is closer to a mystery shop than a survey, because a survey only tells you what a clinic believes about itself. We contact real clinics the way a real prospective patient would, and time what happens:
- We fill in the clinic’s own website contact form, as a new patient asking about treatment.
- We call during the hours the clinic posts on its own website.
- We call again after those hours close, and leave a voicemail if nobody answers.
Same caller, same script, same message, across every clinic in a given wave, inside the same short window — usually under a week. So what varies between clinics is the clinics, not us. Then we track every reply: whether one arrived at all, which channel it came back on, who sent it, and how long it took.
What we’re trying to measure, and what we’re not
The question we’re answering is narrow, and deliberately so: if someone new tries to reach this clinic today, what happens?
We’re not grading clinical quality, staff competence, or bedside manner — several of the clinics we’ve shopped so far have excellent front desks that are simply unavailable at the moment someone tries to reach them, which is a different problem with a different fix. We’re also not measuring whether a fast reply actually converts to revenue; that needs financial data we don’t have and won’t guess at.
We publish results only in aggregate. No clinic is ever named, no result is ever attached to an identifiable clinic, and nothing about a specific call — the exact day, the exact time — appears in what we publish. The point isn’t to embarrass any one practice. It’s to give the category a shared number it currently doesn’t have.
Why we’re doing this publicly, and why it’s not finished
This is a first attempt at something nobody else in this category has built. The methodology has real, named weaknesses today: timing confounds, small comparison groups, one metro so far. They’re listed in full in the write-up below, ahead of the results.
The first results — 33 clinics, five days, one city — are in the next piece: the full study.
