Asking Patients How They Found Your Clinic with Lead Sources

Most practices ask new patients some version of “how did you find us?” — and then have nowhere consistent to put the answer. Lead sources give you that place. You build a short list of the options that matter to your clinic, and offer that list to patients as they enroll, then stores whichever one they picked on the membership.

The result is that every membership can tell you which billboard, referral partner, or search result produced it, without anyone having to remember to write it in a note.

This is the patient’s own answer, in their words as much as your list allows. If what you need instead is machine attribution — which ad click produced which signup, with nothing asked of the patient — see Tracking Where Your Enrollments Come From. The two work happily side by side.

Building Your List

Go to Billing, then Settings, and find the Lead Sources section.

The list starts empty. Click + Source to add a row, then type the name. Add as many rows as you need. To rename one, type over it. To take one off the list, use the trash icon at the end of its row.

Nothing is saved as you type. The Cancel and Save buttons appear as soon as you change anything, and Save commits the whole list at once — every addition, rename, and removal together. Cancel puts the list back exactly as it was.

A few things to know while you build it:

• Names can be up to 50 characters, and you can have up to 100 sources.
• You cannot use the same name twice, and capitalization does not make it different. If “Google” is already on the list, “google” is rejected as a duplicate.
• Patients see the sources in the order they appear here, so put the ones you expect most often near the top. There is no drag-to-reorder — the order is simply the order of the rows when you save.
• The save is all-or-nothing. If one row is rejected, nothing is saved and the list stays as it was, so you can fix the row and save again without losing your other edits.

Where Patients Are Asked

The question appears in two places.

On an enrollment link. Patients enrolling themselves through one of your enrollment links see the question on the final step, below payment and above your membership terms. It is phrased as “How did you find us?”

In the EHR. When you enroll a patient yourself, the Enroll Patient dialog has a Lead source field in the Billing Settings section, so front-desk staff can record what the patient said in person or over the phone.

In both places the question is optional. A patient can skip it, and your staff can leave it blank, and enrollment finishes normally either way. Neither one has a free-text box: the answer is always one of the options you configured, which is what keeps the data worth reporting on. If you want to capture “other,” add it to your list as a source in its own right.

Employer memberships are the exception: they never carry a lead source. The question is about how a patient found your clinic, and for an employer plan the answer is always the same — their employer brought them. So it is not asked on an employer enrollment link, not shown in the Enroll Patient dialog for an employer plan, and not recorded on memberships created by an eligibility file.

Choosing Which Enrollment Links Ask

Asking is off by default on every enrollment link, so turning the feature on in Billing Settings does not change any link you have already shared.

To turn it on for a link, edit the link and switch on Show lead source question. You then decide how much of your list that link offers:

• All sources — the link offers your whole list. New sources you add later show up on this link automatically.
• A specific set — turn All sources off and pick the sources you want from the dropdown. Useful when a link lives in one place and only a few answers make sense: a link on your Instagram bio does not need “Drove past the clinic” as an option.

If you pick a specific set, you have to choose at least one source — a link cannot ask the question and then offer nothing.

One thing that trips people up: the Show lead source question toggle does not appear on the enrollment link form at all until you have added at least one source in Billing Settings. If you cannot find it, build your list first. It also does not appear on an employer link, for the reason above.

Changing a Source After Enrollment

An answer is not locked in at enrollment. Open the patient’s membership and look at the Billing Settings section — the Source row shows what was recorded, and the edit button lets you change it.

This is the row to use when a patient tells the front desk something different from what they clicked, or when you are filling in history for patients you brought over from another system.

Three things to know about it:

• The row only appears on retail memberships.
• You can change a recorded source to a different one, or clear it back to blank with the × in the picker. Clearing is the fix when a source was recorded in error and none of your options is the right answer.
• The membership has to be one whose billing settings you can still edit — active, pending, or deferred. On a paused, canceled, or archived membership, the Source row still shows what was recorded, but the edit button is unavailable.

Renaming and Removing Sources

This is the part worth reading twice, because it is what makes the numbers trustworthy.

What a patient picked is recorded as a snapshot. The membership keeps the name as it read on the day they enrolled, not a live pointer to your settings.

So renaming a source does not rewrite history. If you rename “Facebook” to “Meta Ads,” every membership recorded before the rename still says “Facebook,” and only enrollments from that point on say “Meta Ads.” That is deliberate — it means a tidy-up of your list can never quietly restate what happened last quarter. It also means that if you want a rename to read as a continuation of the same channel rather than a new one, you will need to treat the two names as one when you report on them.

Removing a source works the same way. Removing does not erase it from memberships that already recorded it — those keep showing the name they captured. What removal does is stop the source being offered to anyone new. It disappears from your enrollment links and from the Enroll Patient dialog, and that is the whole effect.

Two consequences follow from that:

• If you edit the Source row on a membership whose recorded source has since been removed from your list, the dropdown opens with nothing selected, because the old value is no longer an option you can save. The read-only row still shows it; the picker cannot offer it.
• Removing a name frees it. You can create a source with that exact name again later — the system only checks for duplicates against the sources currently on your list.

Because of all this, removing a stale source is safe. You are retiring an option, not deleting data.