The teardown
Three places the money leaks. With the arithmetic.
Every number below is either sourced from public data or driven by an input you can change. Where a figure could not be sourced honestly, it says so instead of guessing. Move the controls and watch what happens to a practice the size of yours.
Money in. Patients out. No line between them.
Two things bleed at once: inquiries nobody ever answers, and revenue you can’t trace back to the ad that paid for it. Move the slider and watch both.
You answer a new inquiry inMonday · Typical
<5 min1 hrMonday
Source attribution
Defaults are sourced — $141 cost per inquiry (LocaliQ 2025), $1,300 episode value (LifeStance FY2025). Reachability is anchored to peer-reviewed secret-shopper studies: 50.5% of psychiatry inquiries got no response at all. The decay between points is a modelled assumption, not a finding.
app.velant.ai/attribution
Paid acquisition
Last 30 days · four systems, no shared ID
Inquiries82$12,000 spent
Never reached5365% never answered
Admitted5patients
Revenue—cannot be traced
Cost per admit—unknown
AdmittedBooked, no-showReached, never bookedNever reached
| Source | Spend | Inquiries | Admits | Revenue | Cost / admit |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Google Ads | $5,040 | 36 | ? | ? | ? |
| Psychology Today | $2,640 | 23 | ? | ? | ? |
| $2,400 | 14 | ? | ? | ? | |
| $1,920 | 10 | ? | ? | ? | |
| Total | $12,000 | 82 | 5 | ? | ? |
The booking never links back to the ad. Ads live in one system, the lead in another, the appointment in a third. You can see spend and you can see patients — not which spend made which patient.
Where every number comes from 21 sources · peer-reviewed, federal and first-party where it exists
Acquisition & reachability
- $141.17 cost per inquiry, mental health paid search — LocaliQ, 3,542 US campaigns.
- 50.5% of psychiatry inquiries produced no response at all; 3.1% ended in a booked appointment — Tenner et al., Community Mental Health Journal, 2023.
- 17% of contacts were offered an appointment — Adams et al., Psychiatric Services, 2023.
- $158.26 revenue per visit — LifeStance FY2025, audited, 9.0M visits.
Software pricing
- All six list prices read from vendor pricing pages: SimplePractice, BestNotes, Claim.MD, Spruce, IntakeQ, Doxy.me, Acuity.
- 85% of behavioral health providers run partly integrated or fully siloed systems — Behavioral Health Business, 2025.
Admin time & denials
- Per-transaction minutes — 2024 CAQH Index: eligibility 16 manual / 4 electronic, claim submission 12 / 5, claim status 25 / 7.
- 9.5 min median per note — Apathy et al., J Gen Intern Med, 2022, 215,207 physicians.
- 9.2% initial denial rate on professional claims — Health Affairs Scholar, 234M claims.
- 24.3% of denials trace to registration and eligibility — Optum 2024 Denials Index, 124M remits.
- AI scribes cut note time 9.5% (Nabla) and 1.7%, not significant (DAX) — Lukac et al., NEJM AI, 2025.
What we deliberately do not claimNo credible initial-denial rate exists for behavioral health specifically. There is no published measurement of minutes-per-note for therapists, or of time lost to duplicate data entry, so neither is quantified here. And the familiar “21× more likely” speed-to-lead statistic traces to a 2007 vendor study with no stated method — we do not use it.