In August 2026, over a five-day window, we contacted 33 U.S. hormone and longevity clinics the way a real prospective patient would — through their website contact form, by phone during their own posted hours, and by phone again after those hours closed.
Twenty-five were independent, owner-operated clinics in the Tampa, Florida metro. Eight were national chains and telehealth brands, contacted the same week under the same script, as a comparison group rather than as prospects.
This is the first wave of a benchmark we intend to keep running (see why we’re building this). It’s also a first attempt, run by one person, in one city. So before any number, here’s exactly where it’s weak.
Where this study is weak — read this before the numbers, not after
This measures responsiveness, not revenue. We know whether an inquiry got answered. We don’t know whether an unanswered inquiry actually cost a clinic a patient. That’s a real, open question, and it’s the one thing this kind of measurement can’t answer on its own.
One city, one week, one shopper. Tampa is close to a full census of the independent clinics that fit our criteria there, which makes it a strong measurement of that city. But it isn’t yet evidence that every metro looks the same. We plan to run the same method elsewhere before treating Tampa as universal, and we’ll publish it when we do.
With those on the table, here’s what we did and what came back.
Why we did this
There’s no existing, independent measurement of how responsive hormone and longevity clinics actually are to a new patient trying to reach them. Owners have opinions about their own front desk. Nobody has a number.
So we wanted one — measured the same way a real patient experiences it. Not self-reported, not surveyed. Actually tested.
Method
Twenty-five owner-operated hormone, TRT, and longevity clinics in the Tampa metro — close to the full population of qualifying independent clinics in that city, not a small sample drawn from a much larger pool.
Eight additional national chains and telehealth brands were contacted the same week as a comparison arm; they were never prospected, and their individual results are reported only in aggregate below.
For each of the 25 independent clinics, over five days:
- The web form. We submitted the clinic’s own website contact form as a new patient, asking whether they offer hormone therapy and what’s involved. The message had no call-to-action — it didn’t ask the clinic to call, text, or email back — so whichever channel a clinic chose to reply on was its own choice, not a hint we gave it.
- The in-hours call. We called during the business hours the clinic itself posts on its own website.
- The after-hours call. We called again after those hours closed and left a voicemail with a callback number if nobody answered.
Same caller, same script, same message, same week, for every clinic. Replies were tracked through the following Wednesday evening — so a voicemail left the first evening had three full business days to get a callback, and a web form submitted Monday morning had roughly two.
Results, by channel
Four numbers matter most here — one per channel, plus how many clinics missed on at least one of them.
The web form was the cleanest measurement. No day-of-week issue, an identical message to every clinic, and no hint about how to reply. 15 of 25 clinics — 60% — never answered an inquiry submitted through their own site. Either nothing came back at all, or the only reply was a broken auto-response.
A few of those never had a working channel to fail in the first place: two clinics have no contact form anywhere on their site, one has no website at all, and one has a real form a site bug hides from visitors.
Among the ones that did reply, the fast ones were genuinely fast — several replies came back as a text or a phone call inside twenty minutes, from a named person — and the median time to a human reply was 46 minutes.
But the mean was much higher, 13 hours (13.2h, precisely), because a handful of replies took a day or two. Both are worth publishing side by side: the ten human replies came back at 3, 7, 10, 12, 18 and 73 minutes, then 20, 22, 42 and 46 hours.
The after-hours voicemail told a similar story, read through callbacks rather than pickups. Two of the 25 clinics publish no phone number at all and were never callable.
Of the remaining 23, nobody answering the phone at 8pm on its own isn’t a damning finding — some of these clinics are closed weekends anyway. What we measured instead was whether a message with a callback number ever got a callback: a fair comparison for any clinic that was open the next business day. Result: 14 of 23 clinics — 61% — never called or texted back a voicemail left after hours, through three full business days.
Of the nine that did respond, the split matters. Five sent an instant automated text within seconds of the call ending — a machine, not a person. Only four got a real human callback, and every single one of those came on the following Monday or Tuesday — 41h10, 41h17, 42h03 and 64h12 after the message was left — for an average wait of 47 hours.
So the honest version isn’t “39% called back.” It’s closer to this: most after-hours messages either vanish for three days or get answered by a bot, and an actual person calling back at all is the exception, not the rule.
The in-hours phone result was the one we didn’t expect. We assumed clinics would be reliable during their own posted business hours. They weren’t: 8 of 21 clinics called — 38% — didn’t answer their own phone during hours they’d posted themselves — voicemail, a hold that went nowhere, or a phone menu that dead-ended.
The other 13 of 21 answered live, on the spot, no wait time to measure — and in our experience they were genuinely good: attentive, willing to answer follow-up questions, in no hurry to get off the phone. So the problem in this category isn’t that the people are bad at the job. It’s that they’re unavailable at the moment it matters.
Put together, 22 of the 25 clinics — 88% — missed on at least one channel. Three clinics answered cleanly across all three — proof the test wasn’t built to fail, since some clinics simply didn’t fail it.
A note on why these denominators move: 25 clinics got a web form, 23 had a working phone number to leave an after-hours voicemail with, and 21 were actually reached during business hours. Every rate above is computed on its own real denominator — never on “33,” which describes who we contacted across both groups, independents and chains together, and never doubles as a response-rate denominator.
What the comparison group showed
Of the eight national and chain-operated brands contacted the same week (two had no working phone channel to test), the pattern ran the other way: most answered live during business hours, and a couple answered live after hours as well — including one call that was transferred straight through to what sounded like an owner’s personal line.
It’s a small group, so we’re treating it as a directional signal rather than a proven gap. But the direction is worth naming: the practice of being reliably reachable already exists in this market. It just isn’t evenly distributed.
Why we think it holds anyway
Before we placed a single call, we set a bar for ourselves: if fewer than 40% of the 25 clinics — fewer than 10 — showed a real gap, we’d conclude there wasn’t a story here and say so. The result cleared that bar by more than double on every honest way we cut the data, including with the after-hours pickup rate thrown out entirely — the one measurement above we already flagged as too weak to lean on.
Three clinics passed cleanly, which is the detail that convinces us the test wasn’t rigged to produce a result — a clinic genuinely could pass it, and some did.
We’re not done measuring this
This is wave one, not the whole picture. We’re running it again — in Tampa first, on a cleaner schedule, and then in other metros as we go. Each wave gets published the same way: limitations first, then the numbers, never the other way around.
The goal isn’t a single study. It’s a benchmark this category has never had — checked, rerun, and updated on a regular cadence until it’s a number clinics can actually measure themselves against. If you run one of these clinics and want to know how your own front desk would score, get in touch.
