Chris Kresser: Good questions. As far as average patient case fee, I’m a little embarrassed to say, but I’m not remembering off the top of my head. This is good news, actually. I purposely set things up so that I’m free to just focus on being a clinician and developing content and getting as much support everywhere else that I can, but of course, it wasn’t always that way. At the beginning, I was doing almost everything myself, and I could have rattled off the answer to all of these kinds of questions right off the bat without thinking about it, but I’m going to cheat and look at our own clinic website so I can answer.
We’ve done this a lot of different ways, but currently the initial consult with me is $245. That includes the 30-minute phone or Chiron appointment with Dr. Nett right now, but it may soon be a new physician that we’re going to hire or a nurse practitioner or a physician assistant that we train to do that. They get dietary guidelines and then case review prep stuff. Part of that fee includes the time that the staff has to spend getting that new patient established as a new patient, so you always want to make sure that you consider that as you’re pricing your services. Then the case review with me is $950, and that includes the 60-minute in-person consult with me and then my time spent creating the report of findings outside of the appointment time. And that also includes considerable staff time that is involved still with that setup of the new patient. I can’t remember the exact numbers when I was first starting out, but they were certainly lower than that. I think the whole thing altogether was more in the neighborhood of $450 to $650, if I recall. Those are just fees for my time and for the staff setting the patient up as a new patient. That doesn’t include labs or supplements or anything like that.
For labs, it varies, but the average fee for lab tests ordered during the case review process is $600 to $1500, depending on the complexity of the condition and the level of the diagnostics required. Then the fee for the supplements that are prescribed as part of the treatment plan after the case review is typically $150 to $300, which of course patients have the opportunity to approve or decline that. And then the grand total of the case review fees that we estimate on the website is somewhere between $1750 and $3700 for the whole shebang.
This is freely available on our website. I do recommend that you make your fees available on your website and that you be transparent with that. I think it’s just better. It’s better for patients to know up front what they’re getting into. You’ll have fewer problems down the line. There’s less of a sticker shock. But if you are going to post your fees, you need to also post a lot of information about why those fees are the way they are. The way we do it on our website, we describe the case review process in great detail so that by the time the patient gets to the bottom of the page, they can see that we’re doing an extremely comprehensive workup and we’re approaching them in a way that they’ve probably never been approached at any other clinic. We frequently hear from patients that it’s by far the most comprehensive workup that they’ve ever had, and they are really excited by the time they leave the case review appointment because they feel like they have a clear understanding of what’s causing their problems and a clear treatment plan, like I said, often for the first time ever. We don’t actually get a lot of complaints about expense at this point, I think, in part, because we do a really good job of breaking things down. Patients are really satisfied and happy after their case review, and as I said earlier when I was answering Brent’s question, I think we have kind of created a situation where we’re attracting the kind of patients that we want to attract through the online platform.