Immediately Grow Your Surgical Business by 20%

As a healthtech CEO, I frequently observe one fundamental truth: today’s healthcare consumers expect immediate, seamless interactions—much like the on-demand experiences offered in other industries. For surgeons, surgical practice administrators, and medical device executives, are you aiming for a 20% growth in 2025? If so, optimizing patient engagement in your practice or the practices you work with is imperative. One of the most effective strategies to achieve this is implementing a “missed-call-text-back” system, especially in conjunction with Google Ads.

Understanding Changing Consumer Behavior Is Key

A recent McKinsey Report highlights a significant shift in consumer behavior. Although the pandemic is over, there is no return to the norms we saw five years ago—especially when it comes to patients’ heightened expectations of speed and convenience.

During the pandemic, consumers compressed a decade’s worth of digital adoption into mere months, causing businesses to pivot rapidly. Unfortunately, healthcare, initially focused on care delivery, is still overlooking the superior customer journey patients now demand. Today’s healthcare consumer wants immediate answers and easy scheduling—“whatever they want, whenever they want,” delivered within minutes.

A surprising insight from McKinsey’s findings:

• 75% of consumers have new buying behaviors centered on convenience and value.
• 39% switched brands (particularly Gen Z and millennials).

This disruption in retail and other industries also applies to healthcare. Patients in need of surgical services are less loyal to a single provider, system, or group, and more responsive to convenience, speed, and overall patient experience. This opens a significant opportunity for surgical practices to grow by offering simpler, faster engagement.

The Strategy to Grow Your Surgical Business by 20%

1. Missed Call Text Back

Surgeons often use Google Ads to drive patients to educational landing pages. While these pages help patients understand treatment options, ultimately, an appointment must be scheduled to secure the patient’s care. Phone calls remain a primary engagement method—even though they can be costly, inconsistent, and heavily reliant on front-desk staff.

In this new era where convenience and value often eclipse a surgeon’s expertise in the patient’s decision-making process, a missed-call-text-back system can solve common phone-based problems in the practice:

• Immediate Engagement: When the phone rings but isn’t answered, a text message is automatically sent to the prospective patient, offering a hassle-free way to continue the conversation. This meets the patient’s need for immediate attention.
• Reduced Overhead & Hassle: The front desk can prioritize ongoing office tasks while the missed-call-text-back feature handles initial patient inquiries.
• Improved Conversions: Prospective patients no longer slip through the cracks because the practice “missed” their call.

Real-world data underscores the impact: This example off a standard implementation shows 25 new patient calls arriving through a Google Ad campaign with only a fraction being answered on the spot, the majority of potential new patients are lost when they failed to leave a message.?

With a missed-call-text-back system, a significant share of those “lost” callers can be re-engaged, often leading to scheduled consultations.?

This simple act of re-engagement can yield a 20% increase in surgical volume by capturing patients who would otherwise move on.

2. Prequalification

To further optimize this process and lock in patients, practices should prequalify the new patient inquiries they are texting. Once a prospective patient responds to the text message:

• Triage Quickly: Identify the type of procedure required and the urgency.
• Assess Fit: Determine if the patient’s condition aligns with the surgical expertise of the practice and surgeon desires, ensuring the appointment is productive for both the practice and the patient.
• Enhance Staff Efficiency: Encourage front-desk teams to focus on high-value interactions and prioritize scheduling qualified patients, optimizing both the surgical schedule and patient satisfaction.

When paired with missed-call-text-back, prequalification ensures that the right patients are engaged promptly, preventing wasted resources and the frustration of unproductive appointments.

In this example we illustrate the value of prequalification in the miss-call-text-back patient journey. With missed-call-text-back and a structured prequalification system in place, 25 calls can generate a significant volume of scheduled cases.?

These measures underscore the significant value of missed-call-text-back and a patient journey designed around convenience. As we all seek more insight on how to maximize ROI, scheduled case data is a key component in guiding future decisions regarding ad spend and resource allocation.

3. Deep Conversion Tracking

After missed-call-text-back and prequalification processes are established, the final step in value creation is deep conversion tracking. This strategy tracks each patient from their initial call or ad click through to a scheduled consultation—or even through to a completed surgical procedure. By integrating deep conversion tracking with Google Ads, you gain three critical benefits:

• Precise Data on Scheduled Patients: Know exactly which ads generate high-value patients who align with your surgical expertise.
• HIPAA-Compliant Reporting: Safely report essential scheduling data back to Google for accurate ad campaign optimization.
• Improved Ad Targeting: Instead of measuring only how many people clicked or texted, Google can optimize ads based on actual appointments scheduled, driving higher-quality leads and better returns on ad spend.

Practices implementing deep conversion tracking often see dramatic improvements — sometimes exceeding 200% in Ad performance, increasing surgical volumes significantly — without increasing their advertising budget. By feeding Google the data on which clicks turn into real surgeries, the algorithm will start delivering more “ideal” patients, increasing the efficiency of your overall marketing efforts.

In this last example Ad retargeting with Deep Conversion Tracking transforms the surgical volume created for the practice. Adding considerable efficiency to any given Ad campaign without inherently increasing Ad spend.

Conclusion

Key Benefits of Missed Call Text Back, Prequalification, and Deep Conversion Tracking

Immediate Patient Engagement

• Ensures no new patient is lost due to missed calls, aligning with the modern consumer’s desire for instant contact.

Efficient Patient-Surgeon Match

• Helps the front desk determine if a caller is a suitable candidate, optimizing the surgical schedule and improving patient flow.

Enhanced Scheduling Rates

Converts more inbound interest into actual appointments, resulting in a direct boost in surgical volume.

Optimized Marketing Spend

By integrating deep conversion tracking, Google Ads learn which patient leads are most valuable, refining future ad targeting and driving a higher ROI.

Sustained Practice Growth

Capturing and effectively triaging inbound calls can increase your patient volume by at least 20%, establishing a robust pipeline of highly qualified surgical candidates.

By leveraging these technologies and processes, surgical practices can thrive in today’s fast-paced healthcare marketplace, exceeding their growth goals and providing a superior patient experience. If you’re considering ways to grow your surgical business, implementing a missed-call-text-back system, coupled with strategic prequalification and deep conversion tracking, can be the game-changer you need to immediately boost revenue and patient volume in 2025 and beyond.

Fire up!