The entire world has gone digital – yet when it comes to healthcare, personal connection still matters. For patients seeking care, the first instinct is still to pick up the phone and call. Every inbound call is looking for someone they can trust, and a voice on the phone is one of the best ways to build that relationship. Call tracking can help you collect important data and insights that will increase your marketing ROI and create a better patient experience.
The power of the phone
When someone is sick, they want help fast – and the phone is the most direct way to get it. With immediate responses and clearer communication, it remains the first point of contact for most patients.
Many industries consider calls inefficient, time-consuming, and hard to track and analyze, instead preferring more text-based communication channels like online forms, chat functions, and SMS. Despite their ease, none of these methods deliver the personal connection that moves someone from caller to patient, nor the data and insights available in those phone conversations.
The average phone call yields 705 words from callers. In contrast, SMS, chat, and forms typically yield 241 words combined, while all text-based channels generate less than 100 words of content. While text may offer an efficient first touch, phone calls, especially in healthcare, offer a deeper level of context that can help direct patients to the correct care and, with the proper framework, glean valuable insights for marketing purposes.
To harness call data effectively, healthcare marketers need to create a framework to learn where calls are coming from, how patients find them, and what staff members can do to convert a prospective patient into a recurring patient. Call tracking is the best place to start.
Chris Nelson, senior manager of vertical marketing at CallRail, points out that inbound conversations provide more valuable lead data than other methods.
“They show high buying intent. When you pick up the phone to call, you’re already consenting to be a potential customer,” Nelson says. “It’s a much more efficient conversion path because you’re on the phone with the person you’re trying to convert already.”
Creating a HIPAA-compliant call tracking environment
Calls are a goldmine for data, but healthcare marketing offers greater regulatory challenges than other industries. CallRail’s Healthcare Plan enables healthcare providers to track calls without sacrificing HIPAA compliance.
Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Guidelines issued last year make it clear that healthcare providers must have a Business Associate Agreement (BAA) with any vendor handling protected health information (PHI) to feel safe in their compliance. CallRail’s Healthcare Plan includes a BAA and offers enhanced security features such as auto-redacted call transcripts, unique log-in credentials with auto timeouts, secure servers, and end-to-end data encryption to support HIPAA compliance.
Turn missed calls into new patients
"If you don’t know how many calls you’re missing, you don’t know how many opportunities you’re losing," notes Nelson. Fortunately, call tracking provides a wealth of data, and starting with the basics can help create a solid foundation for strategy later on.
Nelson says marketers should begin with a few key questions:
- How many calls am I missing regularly? CallRail research shows that healthcare providers miss 32% of incoming calls – a percentage that’s significantly higher than other industries we analyzed. When you miss a call, your prospective patient goes to the next provider on their list.
- Do you have a follow-up process for missed calls? Reaching out to missed calls can help recapture those inbound leads.
- Are those calls being converted to appointments? Once you know your total call volume, you can accurately assess how many calls you convert into appointments and patients.
Every call is an opportunity, and how you approach missed calls is just as crucial as how you approach the patients you talk to right away.
The metrics that matter
Data alone is just a tool – you need metrics to tell a story. Nelson recommends starting with four key metrics that can guide your decisions.
- Conversion rate: Every call is a potential patient, but how many inquiries actually become appointments?
- Cost per lead (CPL): You likely invest in Google Ads, PPC, and email marketing. How much are you spending per incoming call when you add up your budget?
- Patient acquisition cost (PAC): You converted a patient. Great! How much did you spend to take them from the first time they learned of your practice to sitting in the appointment room?
- Patient lifetime value (PLV): How much revenue will each patient bring to your practice? If PLV is breaking even or lower than your patient acquisition cost, it’s time to see how to trim your expenses and increase your ROI.
With these metrics in mind, you can assess your marketing strategy accurately.
AI-powered tools increase conversions
Making wise decisions with your marketing budget is impossible without data and metrics. Fortunately, CallRail’s Call Tracking can deliver the data you need. When combined with our AI-powered tools like Premium Conversation Intelligence™ and Convert Assist, it can help save time, increase efficiency, and boost your marketing ROI.
“Businesses often forget that phone calls hold a massive amount of untapped intelligence,” says Jason Tatum, vice president of product at CallRail. “Call Tracking paired with AI can extract key patterns from conversations, helping teams optimize every patient interaction.”
Here’s a closer look at how:
Call Tracking: Knowing how many calls you’re getting is a good start, but understanding their origin is even more powerful. Call Tracking helps define the patient journey and illuminates the most effective marketing channels. Using attribution data can help reduce the cost per lead and help you hone your strategy using only the ad methods that work for your practice.
Tatum points out that Call Tracking allows marketers to access granular data to pinpoint specific campaigns, keywords, and groups. Call Tracking also offers customizable call automation, where specific data points are automatically sorted, allowing you to instantly see all pertinent data. With that data in hand, practices can implement call flows to help mitigate missed calls and automated responses to continue the patient experience even after their call is complete.
Premium Conversation Intelligence: Conversion is more than simply answering the phone. Using AI-generated call transcripts, summaries, and sentiment analysis, you can uncover what your patients are looking for and how to serve them better.
"Sentiment analysis and call transcripts provide a wealth of insight into patient intent. As Jason Tatum explains, “A conversation is more than just words — it’s tone, urgency, and context. AI helps surface those nuances, so healthcare providers can act faster and more effectively.”
Convert Assist: With limited time in the day, the faster you can move to the next part of a patient's conversion journey, the better. Convert Assist creates an action plan seconds after the conclusion of a call. It offers immediate steps to help increase conversions, including automatically written smart follow-up messaging through email or text. It also provides real-time coaching to deliver feedback to your staff. Making every interaction better helps increase patient experiences and support retention.
From campaign to conversion
Every healthcare marketing professional struggles to do more with less. CallRail can help you accurately assess what’s working or not and how to optimize your strategy for better results.
By leveraging Call Tracking, Premium Conversation Intelligence, and Convert Assist, you can turn patient inquiries into appointments, reduce missed opportunities, and maximize marketing ROI. Take control of your patient acquisition strategy with the right tools from CallRail—so every call counts.
