Call tracking on every source
A unique number per page, campaign, and channel. When the phone rings you know the keyword, the ad, and the page behind it. This is the single thing most facilities are missing.
The short answer
Behavioral health lead generation is the work of producing qualified admissions inquiries, whether calls, texts, or form fills, and routing them into a CRM so nothing is lost. It differs from lead generation in other industries because of how those inquiries may be paid for. The Eliminating Kickbacks in Recovery Act, passed in 2018, makes it a federal crime to pay a percentage or per-patient fee for referrals to treatment facilities, recovery homes, and clinical labs. Several states, Florida among them, have their own patient brokering statutes on top of it.
average unanswered-call rate found in new client audits — verify with Tim
Inquiries lost inside the building, before marketing is the problem
median cost per admission across managed accounts — confirm
Cost per admission across the client base
What it includes
Behavioral Health Lead Generation: what it covers
Call recording and qualification scoring
Recorded and scored calls, so a lead counts when it was a real admissions conversation and not a wrong number or a vendor. Reported volume drops the first month and gets honest.
CRM build and routing
Salesforce, KIPU, or whatever you run. Inquiries land in the right queue with the source attached, and the follow-up sequence fires without anyone remembering to.
Forms, chat, and text intake
Built so protected health information never lands in a system with no business associate agreement behind it. Ask for the minimum needed to call someone back.
Speed-to-lead alerting
An inquiry at 11pm on a Saturday is worth nothing on Monday. Alerts, routing, and after-hours coverage rules get set with your admissions team.
Cost per admission reporting
Spend, calls, qualified calls, admissions, cost per admission, by channel. If a channel cannot be traced to an admission, we say so instead of padding the report.
The compensation question comes first
EKRA, codified at 18 U.S.C. 220, made it a federal crime to knowingly pay or receive remuneration for referring a patient to a recovery home, clinical treatment facility, or laboratory. It applies to every payer, including private insurance and cash, which makes it broader than the Anti-Kickback Statute most healthcare marketers know. Courts have applied it to marketers and sales employees compensated on volume.
The effect on marketing is direct. Pay-per-admission and percentage-of-revenue arrangements are the structures under scrutiny. Fixed-fee marketing services are the ordinary path. Florida's Patient Brokering Act, and similar statutes in other states, adds another layer with its own definitions.
We are not your lawyers and this is not legal advice. What we do is build engagements as flat-fee work on your own infrastructure, so the assets and the phone numbers belong to you, and hand your healthcare counsel a structure they can approve. confirm current engagement structure and fee model with Tim
Own the infrastructure, not a lead subscription
A purchased lead is sold to whoever else bought that hour. Your admissions team competes with three other facilities on the same call, and the moment you stop paying, the flow stops. Nothing accumulated.
The alternative is slower and it compounds. Your site ranks, your ads run on your account, the phone numbers are yours, the CRM history is yours, and every month of work makes the next one cheaper. Facilities that own all of it stop being exposed to one vendor's pricing, and stop worrying about their digital marketing at all.
The honest version of the tradeoff: if you need beds filled in three weeks, paid search is the only lever that moves that fast, and it costs the most per call. If you need cost per admission down over a year, search and local do that. Most programs need both running at once.
Where inquiries actually die
Almost every facility we look at is losing more admissions inside the building than outside it. Calls ring to a line nobody covers after 6pm. Voicemails sit until the next business day. Inquiries arrive by three different channels and live in three different places. Fixing that raises admissions without touching the marketing budget.
So the first thing we install is measurement of the handoff. Every inquiry gets a source, a timestamp, a recording, and an outcome. Within a few weeks you can see your answer rate, your average time to first callback, and how many qualified conversations never got a second attempt.
Then the marketing spend gets pointed at whatever survives that pipeline. Optimizing ad copy while calls go unanswered is spending money to make a leak bigger.
Free audit
Want this looked at on your site?
We audit your rankings, ads, and call tracking, then show you where admissions are leaking. Yours to keep either way.
Prefer the phone? (561) 269-2833
Who we help
Programs we run this for
Drug and alcohol rehab
Fourteen years in behavioral health, all of it spent getting rehab centers on the phone with people who need a bed. We know your competitors, we know which searches produce a call, and we know which ones only produce a report.
Drug and alcohol detox
Somebody decides to stop drinking at 11pm. Whoever comes up in the results and answers the phone gets the admission, and we build the system that does both.
Medication-assisted treatment clinics
Since Congress killed the X-waiver, every DEA-registered prescriber can treat opioid use disorder. Primary care came in, telehealth came in, and the clinics that owned these searches for a decade now share them.
Mental health centers
We market outpatient mental health, PHP, and IOP programs. Different searcher than rehab, different ad rules, same job: make the phone ring and know which dollar made it ring.
Sober living and halfway houses
A recovery residence sells housing, not a treatment episode, so the number that decides the year is occupancy. Demand arrives from two directions, and most sober living websites are built for only one of them.
Behavioral health centers
That is the structure we find in almost every behavioral health center we audit. Six different searchers, one page they all compete on, and a phone that stays quiet.
Further reading
Written on this in more depth
No gate and no form. These go further than a services page reasonably can.
Drug rehab lead generation
Drug rehab lead generation that builds a channel you own instead of buying shared calls. EKRA-aware, call-tracked, and counted in admissions.
How to get more patients to your practice
How to get more patients without buying more traffic: the four numbers that decide volume, and why answer rate is usually the cheapest one to fix.
Lead generation for MAT clinics
Lead generation for MAT clinics: same-day intake searches, buprenorphine and methadone terms, EKRA-safe structure, and calls tracked to the keyword.
FAQ
Questions we get asked
Do you sell leads?
No. We build the channels that generate inquiries directly to your own phone numbers and forms. Every asset stays in your accounts. Beyond the compliance reasons, a lead sold to you was sold to someone else four minutes earlier.
Can we pay you per admission?
No, and you should be careful with anyone who offers it. EKRA makes paying remuneration for patient referrals to a treatment facility, recovery home, or lab a federal crime, and per-patient or percentage compensation is the structure prosecutors have looked at. Our work is flat-fee. Confirm the specifics with your healthcare attorney.
How fast do calls start?
Paid search can produce calls the week it launches. SEO and local take typical ramp to meaningful organic call volume — verify with Tim. Any agency promising organic admissions volume in 30 days is either buying leads or lying about attribution.
How do you count a lead?
A call over a set duration threshold that a human scored as an admissions conversation, or a form submission with a reachable contact. Wrong numbers, vendors, and current-patient calls get excluded. Reported lead counts usually drop when we take over, because the previous number was counting hangups.
Is our intake form a HIPAA problem?
It can be. A form that collects health information routes into systems that need a business associate agreement, and third-party analytics or ad pixels on that page can transmit identifiable information to a vendor that has no agreement with you. HHS has issued specific guidance on tracking technologies. We build forms to collect the minimum needed to return a call.
What if our admissions team cannot handle more volume?
Then more volume is the wrong goal, and we say so in the audit. We would rather fix answer rate, callback speed, and follow-up sequencing first. Those changes usually produce more admissions than a budget increase would.
Free audit
Find out where your calls are leaking.
We take apart your rankings, your ads, and your call tracking, then show you where the calls are going instead of to you. The audit is yours to keep whether we work together or not.
Prefer the phone? (561) 269-2833