Medicine is the most regulated profession in America. So is advertising it.
Every other business in the country can say what it likes about itself and let the market sort it out. You cannot. Your license, your board, your state's advertising rules, the federal anti‑kickback and patient‑brokering statutes, HIPAA, the FTC, and the platforms' own healthcare gates all sit between you and the first person who ever hears your name. None of that is an accident, and none of it is going away. So the first job is not to write an advertisement. It is to understand what you are allowed to say, to whom, and in which states.
You are not up against a competitor. You are up against an arrangement.
Insurers. Hospital systems. Private equity. Pharmaceutical manufacturers. Device makers. And a Congress that writes the rules with all of them in the room. The arrangement works extremely well for everyone in it. The one participant it does not work for is the physician — and the physician is the one participant who cannot leave without dismantling his own income first.
This is worth saying plainly, because a physician who is thinking about a concierge practice usually assumes the friction he feels is his own fault. It is not. The friction is the predictable result of rules written by and for the incumbents. Here is the public record.
Physicians Advocacy Institute / Avalere Health, Physician Employment Trends and Practice Acquisitions 2018–2026.
American Medical Association, 2025 Prior Authorization Physician Survey (n=1,000).
American Medical Association, Competition in Health Insurance, 2024 data.
And the rules themselves: pharmaceutical and health‑product interests alone reported a record $388 million in federal lobbying in 2024, before hospitals, insurers and device manufacturers are counted. We are not alleging that anyone was bought. We are pointing out something duller and more useful to you: the rules that govern how you practice, how you bill, and how you are permitted to advertise were written in a room. You were not in it. Nobody in that room is going to make it easier for you to leave.
Source: OpenSecrets federal lobbying data for the pharmaceuticals/health products industry, an all‑time high for the sector.
You cannot buy your way into this. There is nothing to buy.
In any other profession, the way out of an employer is to buy a book of business. Not here. Concierge practices almost never come up for sale — the whole point of building one is that the physician wanted his life back, and a man who has just got his life back does not sell it. So the physician looks at the only thing that is for sale: a conventional, insurance‑based practice. That is where the money goes to die.
Buy a practice, then convert it
What you are actually paying for, and what you actually keep
- •A conventional practice is priced off its collections, and its collections come from volume. You are buying two or three thousand patients.
- •A concierge panel is a few hundred families. Most of the people you paid for are not going to follow you into a membership, and there is nothing wrong with them for that — they simply have insurance and no reason to pay twice.
- •MDVIP, the largest concierge network in the country, publishes both ends of that arithmetic itself: 2,000–3,000 patients before, 300–500 after. It also tells physicians plainly that they will not keep them all.
- •So you finance an asset at full volume price and then deliberately destroy most of the thing you financed. The note does not shrink with the panel.
Build one from zero
Slower on paper, and cheaper on every measure that matters
- •Nothing to buy, nothing to borrow, nothing to write off. The first member costs you marketing, not principal.
- •Every patient you take is a patient who chose the model. You are not spending your first two years persuading people who never wanted this.
- •You do not have to quit anything on day one. The panel can be built on evenings and weekends while the paycheck keeps arriving.
- •The build has an end. Marketing spend collapses to replacement once the panel is full — which is the opposite of how marketing usually behaves.
The 2,000–3,000 and 300–500 figures are MDVIP's own published numbers. The share of a panel that converts is arithmetic drawn from those two figures, not a reported conversion rate — nobody in this industry publishes a reliable one, and any firm that quotes you a precise conversion percentage should be asked where it came from.
Converting a bought panel is proven technology. It is also somebody else's business, and it is not ours.
The physicians we work with are not buying a practice and thinning it out. They are starting from nothing, usually while still employed, and the marketing problem that creates is a completely different problem — which is the rest of this page.
This is a big move. Take it slowly on purpose.
Nobody is going to hand you a reason to resign on a Friday, and you should be suspicious of anyone who tries. A panel built from zero takes somewhere north of a year to fill. That is not a defect in the plan — it is the plan. It is also the only version of this that lets you keep eating while you find out whether you like it.
Keep the job
Licensure, entity, contracts, the website, the platform certification and the first pieces of creative all happen while you are still drawing a salary. None of it requires you to give notice, and all of it takes longer than you think.
Evenings and weekends
The first members are seen around the edges of the week. A small panel is genuinely small — this is not a second full-time job, and finding that out for yourself is worth more than any projection we could hand you.
Cut back, don't cut off
Four days, then three. The employed income comes down as the membership income comes up. There is a crossing point and you will be able to see it coming for months before it arrives.
Leave
By the time you resign, the practice already exists, the panel is already paying, and you already know the work suits you. The decision that looked terrifying at Stage 01 turns out to be an administrative one.
A word about the non‑compete. Whatever stage you are at, your current employment agreement governs what you may do while employed and where you may practice afterwards — and hospital and corporate agreements are written by people who anticipated this exact conversation. Have your own lawyer read it before Stage 01, not after Stage 03.
The lawful ways to market a concierge practice
There are seven of them. They are listed here roughly in the order a new practice should reach for them, which is also — not by coincidence — roughly the order of least legal exposure to most. Each one ends in the same place: your own health care attorney, licensed where you practice, before you use it.
1. Your own established patients
If you already have patients, telling them what you are doing is not advertising in the legal sense at all — it is a notice to an existing physician‑patient relationship. Most of the advertising rules that make everything else complicated simply do not reach it. This is why panel conversion is the well‑worn path, and it is the one route a physician starting from zero does not have.
Existing relationship · notice, not solicitation2. Employers and other institutional buyers
Several states flatly prohibit a physician from soliciting a prospective patient in person. New Jersey — among the strictest — writes that prohibition and then expressly excepts offering your services to a bona fide representative of prospective patients, including employers, labor union representatives, or insurance carriers. The door that is closed to you at the patient's kitchen table is open at the firm's conference table.
Bona fide representative exception3. Referral — unpaid, always
A member telling a friend is the cheapest and cleanest patient you will ever get. It stops being clean the moment anything of value moves. Fees, gift cards, discounts on next month's membership, a finder's cut — any of these can convert a referral into a paid patient referral, which is where the anti‑kickback and patient‑brokering statutes live. Florida's is payer‑blind: cash‑only practice is no defence.
Say thank you · never pay4. Your own network, worked deliberately
Not a campaign — a list. Your accountant, your attorney, your financial advisor, the parents on the sideline, the firms your spouse works with. Three hundred families is roughly one large congregation or two youth sports leagues. It is a smaller world than it looks, and an introduction from someone who knows you both carries no regulatory weight at all.
Introductions, not endorsements5. A website that gates on state
A website is not solicitation. It sits there and waits to be found, and the settled test asks whether you targeted a state, not whether someone in that state could reach you. What makes the site lawful is the gate: the visitor names their state before anything else happens, and if you are not licensed there, the site says so and stops. Your licensure is stated on the page, in plain sight, not buried.
The intake gate is the control6. Paid advertising, fenced to your licences
In a number of states, advertising itself is holding yourself out to practise medicine — the offer is the offence, whether or not anyone is ever treated. So campaigns run in the states on your wall and nowhere else. Geo‑targeting is how you keep the budget honest; the state gate on the landing page is how you keep the licence. Never rely on the targeting alone.
Budget control ≠ legal control7. Teaching, speaking, and being quoted
General education about how medicine is paid for is not the practice of medicine, and it is the one channel that crosses state lines without difficulty. A talk to a chamber of commerce, a column in the county bar journal, a podcast, a piece in the local paper — these build the thing paid advertising cannot buy, which is a physician the buyer has already heard of. Keep it educational and keep it away from diagnosis and treatment advice for individuals, and the regulatory surface is small. This is also, candidly, the slowest of the seven, which is why it belongs alongside the others rather than instead of them.
Slow · durable · portable across statesNothing above is legal advice, and it is deliberately general. The rules differ in every state, some of them materially, and the ones that matter most to you are the ones in the states on your own wall. We keep a working document of the underlying statutes and regulations, prepared so that a health care attorney can pick it up and know where to look. Ask us for it and give it to yours.
Eight things that end careers, all of which look harmless.
None of these are exotic. Every one of them is something an ordinary marketing agency would do for an ordinary client on an ordinary Tuesday, without ever knowing it had done anything at all.
Paying anyone, in any form, for a patient
Percentage deals, per‑lead fees, referral bonuses, a broker's commission, free months for an introduction. Marketing may be bought by the hour or by the campaign. It may never be bought by the head.
- ✗Advertising into a state where you are not licensed. In several states the advertisement alone is holding yourself out to practise medicine, and unauthorized practice is a felony in more than one of them.
- ✗A patient testimonial without a signed HIPAA authorization. The happiest review on your page is a disclosure of protected health information until the patient has signed the right form. Enforcement here is real and it is routine.
- ✗Superiority claims you cannot substantiate. “Best,” “top,” “leading,” and every unearned board‑certification implication. The FTC requires substantiation in hand before the claim runs, not after it is questioned.
Language that makes a membership sound like insurance
“Coverage,” “covered,” “plan,” “premium,” “deductible.” Several states have no direct‑care statute at all, which leaves the membership fee itself exposed to being classified as insurance; at least one requires the not‑insurance disclaimer in the marketing, not merely in the contract.
- ✗Cold texts and cold calls. The federal rule is strict and a number of states are stricter. A membership pitch to a phone number you were given for something else is a per‑message statutory penalty.
- ✗Free or discounted care as a door‑opener. Waived fees and complimentary visits are inducements. There are ways to structure a genuine introductory offer; guessing at them is not one.
- ✗Any guarantee, of anything. Outcomes, availability, response times you have not staffed for. We do not permit guarantee language anywhere in work we produce, and neither should you.
“My agency didn't know” is not a defence. In at least one state the physician is expressly responsible for advertising an agent places on his behalf.
You don't need three hundred patients. You need ten firms.
Of the seven routes above, this is the one nobody else is using, and it is the one that moves a panel fastest. Here is the arithmetic nobody in concierge medicine says out loud. Selling memberships one household at a time means a few hundred separate conversations, each starting cold, each worth a single membership. Selling to an employer means ten conversations, each worth thirty households — and the buyer isn't a patient at all. It's the professional service firm down the road that is quietly losing a fortune every time an employee has to take a child to the doctor.
The firm is losing money on well employees
Nobody schedules a heart attack. What drains a law firm or an accounting practice is the routine — a sports physical, a camp form, vaccinations, a well-child visit. Entirely predictable, entirely non-urgent, and entirely capable of eating half a working day.
The problemYou go to them
A private room — a conference room with a door is enough — on a fixed day each month or each week, depending on the size of the firm. You bring the bag. Employees book a slot the way they book a conference room, and bring the child to the office instead of leaving with one.
The offerTelemedicine covers the gaps
The on-site day handles what needs hands. Everything else is a call or a video visit for any enrolled employee and household member — the same day, rather than in three weeks. One firm, and your panel moves by thirty households.
Between visitsWhy a firm listens when a physician says it. An office administrator has heard a hundred benefits pitches. She has never had a doctor offer to come to the building. And the argument isn't a benefits argument — it's arithmetic she can check in front of you. A firm that bills by the tenth of an hour knows exactly what a half-day absence costs. One avoided half-day, by one attorney, generally covers the whole month. You don't promise the saving; you show the calculation with the firm's own numbers and let the managing partner reach the conclusion himself.
The visit day covers more than the sniffles.
Here is where the arithmetic really turns. You are already there, with the bag, in a room with a door, for a whole morning. Almost everything a firm currently sends people across town for can be scheduled into that same morning — and every one of those is another half-day the firm doesn't lose.
The lab work, drawn on site
The annual panel, the follow-up recheck, the fasting draw somebody has been putting off since March. Drawn in the conference room at eight, couriered to the lab, results back to you — instead of a separate morning at a draw station with its own waiting room.
Same morningEmployment screening and clearances
Pre-employment and periodic drug screening, return-to-work clearances, and the exams a firm's insurer or a client contract requires. Today each of those is a scheduling problem and a lost afternoon. On your day they are a slot.
Employer servicesEverything batched into one day
The physical, the vaccinations, the child's camp form, the blood draw and the screening all land on the same morning, booked from one calendar. The firm stops absorbing a scattering of half-days across the year and starts absorbing one predictable morning a month.
The compounding partOne distinction to keep straight, and to put in the agreement. Care you give an employee as her physician and screening you perform for the employer are two different relationships. In the first, the findings are hers and stay with her. In the second, the firm is the party who asked and the party who gets the result — and that work carries its own rules: chain of custody, review of positive results by a qualified reviewer, and federal limits on when an employer may require a medical examination at all. It is ordinary, established work that many physicians already do. It simply has to be papered separately, explained to the employee before anything is collected, and never blurred into the membership.
Member number one is sold by the doctor, personally. Not by a campaign.
That is the honest version, and we would rather say it now than have you discover it in month four. What we build is the list, the introduction, the materials and the follow-through. What you bring is a willingness to walk into a conference room on a Tuesday morning and hand somebody back their afternoon.
The same work reaches families directly.
Everything built for the firms — the film, the key art, the story of why you practice the way you do — is the same work that reaches a household deciding whether to join. One body of creative, two audiences. That is the whole reason this is affordable.
Start where you already are
The state you are licensed in today. Not a licensing project, not a map to fill in — the campaign runs where you can already practice, and it can stay there permanently. Plenty of practices never need a second state.
Step oneOne website, one certification
A single address for your practice keeps the platform approvals simple — certification is granted per website, so one site means one application, one fee, one renewal. It is the difference between a straightforward launch and a paperwork problem.
Keep it simplePlatforms that hold a state line
Search and the major social platforms can all restrict delivery to a single state, provided the settings are configured correctly — and the defaults are wrong out of the box. Broadcast radio and local television cannot, because their markets cross state borders. We use the ones that can.
How it is aimedWhat you have to do that we cannot do for you. The platforms will not accept advertising for telemedicine from anyone who has not been certified by the healthcare accreditation body they all rely on, and that certification belongs to the practice, not to us. It runs about $975 to apply and $2,150 a year to hold, per website, and takes several weeks. Your licenses, your registration and your privacy policy go with it. We will walk you through the application and prepare everything that goes into it — but the practice is the applicant, and the physician signs.
Twenty new members a month, and what that takes.
Most marketing conversations avoid this. Here is the arithmetic instead, with the assumption that matters stated openly so you can argue with it.
About $55 to produce one enquiry
That is the blended published cost across search and social for medical practices. Search costs more per enquiry and converts better; social costs less and reaches people who were not looking yet. Both are used.
How many enquiries become members
This is the honest gap. There is very little published data, because almost nobody advertises a concierge practice. Plan on somewhere between one in ten and one in five, measure it in your first sixty days, and adjust before spending further.
Roughly $340 to $615 to bring in one member
Call it $430 in the middle. At twenty members a month that is about $8,600 a month in total marketing cost, certification and management included.
It stops
Twenty a month fills a few-hundred-family practice in a little over a year. Then the spending collapses to replacing the handful who leave each year. This is a build cost, not a permanent overhead — which is the opposite of how marketing usually works.
Why twenty and not five. Advertising platforms need a certain volume of activity before their systems learn who to show your work to. Below that threshold you pay more per enquiry and get worse targeting — you are funding the platform's education without benefiting from it. A campaign built for twenty a month crosses that line. A campaign built for three never does, and quietly costs more per member while doing it. If the budget is not there yet, the honest answer is to fill the first block of the practice through the firms and the people you already know, and start advertising when it can be done properly.
Figures are August 2026 published industry benchmarks for medical advertising, shown as planning estimates rather than quotations. Costs vary by state, by season and by competition, and the conversion assumption is an estimate, not a measurement. Nothing here is a projection of what any practice will earn, and no result is promised.
You didn't train for eleven years to become a marketer.
So don't. This is the part physicians dread most, and it's the part we built a company to do. FDM Productions exists for exactly this — it started as our own in-house studio, making the films and the content for these ventures, and it became a business of its own because the work turned out to be the thing clients wanted most. It writes, shoots, and edits the content, and it runs the posting. Your job is to be yourself on camera for an afternoon, and then go practice medicine.
Film & trailers
The long piece that earns trust — why you left, how you practice, what a visit with you is actually like. This is what someone watches before they hand over a membership.
Trust & conversionKey art
A single image carrying the problem, and a line of type carrying the answer. It's the format that does a film's work inside a scroll — and it's what keeps a campaign running week after week.
Reach & recognitionSocial management
Somebody has to actually post, consistently, for months. That's us. A steady cadence — never a burst and a silence.
ConsistencyScript & story
The words that make it sound like a person instead of a brochure. Every claim goes to counsel before a designer ever sees it.
Voice & clearanceOne set of work, running wherever you're licensed.
A campaign is not how a practice gets its first members. It is how a practice that already exists stays visible, keeps the referrals warm, and catches the person who went looking. And this is where telemedicine pays off twice: an office practice needs creative that names a town, and a second town needs its own. You need one story, told once, well — and the expensive part of marketing is the thinking and the filming. Do that once and the same work runs wherever you can practice.
We make it once
One sitting, one film, and a bank of key art drawn from it. The costly half of a campaign happens a single time.
You draw the map
The campaign runs in the states you're licensed in, and nowhere else. Add a license, we widen it. That boundary is set in the targeting, not left to chance.
We run and adjust
Posting on a steady cadence, spend aimed where it's working, and honest reporting on what came in — not a wall of vanity metrics.
They book you directly
You set the hours you're available. A patient who's a fit picks one and it lands on your calendar. No phone tree, no front desk, no waiting on a callback.
Why the boundary has to be enforced in the targeting. An office has a boundary a patient can see — they know whether they live near you. A telemedicine boundary is a state line, and it's invisible to the person clicking the ad. Somebody one county over, in the next state, can want you badly and still not be someone you're allowed to treat. Handled carelessly, you pay for that click and they get a disappointing answer. So the license map is built into the campaign from the first day, it moves when your licenses move, and the intake asks what state a person lives in before it asks anything else.
Wanting an office someday doesn't change the plan. It adds a second one.
Plenty of physicians start on the phone and stay there because the life turns out to be the point. Others always meant to open a practice, and use telemedicine as the runway. And some want both at once — in-person locally, telemedicine everywhere else. All three work. The only thing that changes is the shape of the campaign, and we run the tight version too.
The tight local campaign
For an office, geography comes back hard — you're looking for patients inside a sensible drive. A pin on the practice, a radius, and lifestyle signals, so nothing is spent outside the ring you can actually serve.
Radius & neighborhoodWhere that can be aimed
Facebook and Instagram carry true pin-drop radius targeting and do the heavy lifting. Nextdoor is the quiet one for concierge — hyperlocal, by neighborhood, and “the neighborhood's doctor” lands hard there. Search catches the person typing “concierge doctor near me.”
Platform fitRunning both at once
A hybrid practice gets two campaigns off one body of work: the national one aimed at your license map, and a tight one aimed at your door. Same film, same key art, two maps. Each dial turns independently.
The hybridAnd if you see patients somewhere else on a regular day — a town an hour out on Thursdays, a second office later on — that becomes its own pin with its own creative. Your geography is a set of dials. We turn each one up or down as the practice changes.
Built to keep you — and your license — safe.
Medicine has rules that consumer marketing doesn't — fee-splitting laws, anti-kickback rules, corporate-practice doctrine, and advertising standards that vary by board. A campaign that crosses state lines multiplies all of it, because now several boards are looking at the same advertisement. This is built by a CPA who has spent a career keeping professionals on the right side of exactly these lines.
- ✓ Your campaign never runs where your license doesn't. The license map is built into the targeting and updated when your licenses change — and the intake asks what state a person lives in before it asks anything else.
- ✓ A flat fee for the work — never a share of your patient revenue. That distinction is what the fee-splitting laws turn on.
- ✓ No per-patient and no percentage fees — the arrangements that draw anti-kickback scrutiny are the ones we deliberately avoid.
- ✓ Interest routed by licensure and geography, not brokered by the head and never auctioned.
- ✓ Ad targeting by place and lifestyle — never by anyone's health status. Patient messaging stays on consent-based, HIPAA-eligible channels.
- ✓ Every claim lives in the words, never in the picture — so the language a board would examine sits in one reviewable list, cleared by counsel before a designer works from it.
- ✓ Employer arrangements are papered before they are sold. A firm paying for its employees' care raises questions under federal benefits law and under your own state's rules on soliciting patients. We put those to counsel first — and the materials a firm hands its staff are treated as advertising, because that is what they are.
- ✓ No income claims and no promises of patient volume, in any campaign we run for you. Not because it's cautious — because it's the fastest way to lose a license.
- ✓ Structured and papered with healthcare counsel, reviewed state by state before launch.
This is a description of how the program is designed, not legal advice. Concierge medicine, direct primary care, telemedicine, and physician advertising are governed by state-specific laws that vary widely, and a physician practicing across several states is subject to the rules of each. The structure is confirmed with qualified counsel in your states before anything runs.