Every clinic we work with in weight loss, hormone therapy and increasingly dermatology is competing against a national telehealth company with venture funding, no premises, and a lower price.
The instinct is to compete on price. It is the wrong move and the arithmetic says so plainly.
Why you cannot win on price
They have no lease, no front desk, no treatment rooms, and clinicians operating at a scale you cannot reach. Their marginal cost per patient is a fraction of yours.
If you discount to match, you are funding the gap out of a margin that is already carrying a building.
You are not selling the same product at a higher price. You are selling a different product, and the advertising has to say which one.
What you actually have
Labs drawn locally, read locally. A telehealth patient mails a kit or visits a lab that reports to someone they will never meet.
A clinician who has seen them. Dose adjustment by someone with physical context is a genuinely different service.
Somebody who answers. The single most common complaint about telehealth weight loss is that when something feels wrong at 9pm, there is a chat widget.
Continuity. The same clinician, visit after visit.
Accountability. If something goes wrong, there is a named practice in your town with a license and a reputation.
How to advertise that
Not as a comparison. Comparison advertising against a category people are reasonably happy with reads as defensive.
Advertise the thing itself:
- "Your labs, read by the physician who adjusts your dose."
- "Same clinician every visit."
- "We answer the phone."
- "Fifteen minutes to see whether this is right for you — and we'll say if it isn't."
Each of those is true, none is available from a subscription app, and none mentions the competitor.
The economics that make it work
A patient on a monitored protocol is a monthly relationship. Twelve-month value is a multiple of a single transaction, which means you can afford a higher cost per patient than intuition allows — frequently higher than the telehealth company can, because your retention is better when the clinician is a person rather than an app.
Run it properly before setting budgets: what a new patient should actually cost your clinic.
Where you lose
Convenience, price, and speed to first prescription. Those are real and you will not win them.
Which means some patients are not yours, and chasing them with discounts costs you the ones who are.
If you are discounting to match a telehealth competitor, the conversation worth having is what your retention looks like compared to theirs.