Free tool
Hormone therapy follow-up load calculator
See how many hours a week your first year hormone therapy check-ins consume once you count both the reviewing and the chasing.
Free tool, no sign up
Cash pay menopause visit price floor calculator
Find the lowest price a cash pay menopause consult can carry once the messaging and dose questions that follow it are counted as part of the visit.
A menopause initial consult is not a sixty minute product. It is chair time plus charting plus every message about a patch that will not stick, a bleeding episode at week five, and a progesterone dose that is making her groggy. That tail is clinical work, it is unpaid in most cash pay models, and it is why practices that price on chair time alone feel busy and broke at the same time.
This calculator builds the price from the bottom. Enter the minutes the visit really consumes, the messaging you absorb each month before the next paid appointment, your loaded operating cost per clinical hour, and the labs or supplies you swallow. It returns the delivered cost and the floor your fee cannot drop below without eating the margin.
Your result
Total clinical minutes per patient
120
The visit plus every minute of follow-up before the next paid appointment.
Cost to deliver the episode
$345
What those minutes and absorbed labs cost your clinic to produce.
Price floor for the consult
$531
Charge below this and the margin comes out of the follow-up work.
Share of the work after she leaves
The portion of clinical minutes that happens outside the appointment.
Estimates only, built from your own inputs, and worth rerunning whenever your titration cadence or staffing changes.
Why the messaging tail belongs in the price
In a cash pay menopause clinic the follow-up messaging is the service. A patient starting systemic estradiol will have questions about adhesive, about breakthrough bleeding, and about whether the sleep improvement is real or seasonal, and answering those is what keeps her on therapy through month twelve.
If that tail sits outside the fee, the incentive quietly inverts: the patients who need the most contact become the ones who cost you the most to keep. Pricing the messaging in fixes the incentive and lets you answer at week five without resenting it.
What to do when the floor lands above your current fee
The common result is a floor sitting well above what the clinic currently charges, and the reflex is to distrust the calculator. Check the two inputs that usually explain it: the loaded hourly cost, which people set too low by forgetting their own salary, and the messaging minutes, which people guess at rather than measure for a month.
If the numbers hold, you have three levers rather than one. Raise the fee, shorten the tail by replacing scattered messages with scheduled scored check-ins, or move part of the follow-up into a paid twelve week review. Most practices use the second and third together before they touch the first.
Questions about this calculator
Should I include the initial lab draw in the supply cost?
Only if your clinic pays for it and does not bill the patient separately. If she pays the lab directly or the panel is passed through at cost, leave it out. Double counting inflates the floor and makes the whole exercise easy to dismiss.
What is a realistic loaded hourly cost for a solo menopause practice?
Take twelve months of every expense including your own target pay, then divide by the clinical hours you actually sell, not the hours you work. Most solo clinics are surprised because administrative time is real but unsold, which pushes the hourly figure higher than expected.
Does this replace insurance based fee analysis?
No. This models cash pay economics where you set the price. If you bill payers, use it to understand your delivery cost per episode, then compare that against contracted rates to see which visit types are carrying the practice.
More free tools and working documents
Working document
The hormone therapy first year follow-up checklist
A stage by stage checklist for carrying a menopause patient from the initiation visit through month twelve without losing the record that justifies each dose.
Now put that number against a real panel
The figure above came out of minutes you estimated once, sitting still. In PauseNotes it comes off the check-ins your menopause patients actually returned, with the vasomotor and sleep subscales already totaled and the chase list already built. Ask for a walk through and we will load one of your own titration schedules so you can see which part of that number is clinical work and which part is only sending and chasing.