Marketing a physiatry practice.

Who comes to a physiatrist, and who sends them?

The need

Non-surgical care for back, neck and joint pain, nerve testing, and rehabilitation after stroke, brain injury, spinal cord injury, amputation or major surgery.

Urgency

Ongoing care for a long-term condition

Payment

Mostly insurance

Who chooses

A referring physician usually chooses

Outpatient physiatry is mostly musculoskeletal: back and neck pain, sports injuries, arthritis and nerve problems treated without surgery, with injections, nerve studies and a therapy plan. Patients come from primary care, from surgeons who want a non-surgical option tried first, from physical therapists who see a patient stall, and from case managers handling workers' compensation and injury claims.

Hospital-based physiatry follows a different path. Patients recovering from strokes, brain and spinal cord injuries and amputations are referred to inpatient rehabilitation units and then followed in clinic. Hospitals, rehabilitation facilities and discharge planners make those choices, and the physiatrist's relationship with them matters most.

Patient searches are small, and the leading trade term is muddled: rehabilitation marketing likely mixes in addiction rehab with physiatry. Searches for a physiatrist by name are modest, which says the specialty is found through referral and explanation rather than search.

Which listing and review sites matter for physiatry?

Profiles are where a puzzled patient checks who they were sent to. Each one should explain in a line what a physiatrist does, and list the conditions treated in plain words.

• Google Business Profile Free

  Describe the practice as non-surgical spine, joint and nerve care as well as physical medicine and rehabilitation, so patients who never type physiatrist still find it.

• Healthgrades Free

  Patients sent by a surgeon or therapist look up the physiatrist here; list conditions and procedures in plain terms.

• Zocdoc Per new patient

  Fee per new-patient booking; amount not published

  Patients with back or joint pain who can book without a referral may find you here; each new-patient booking carries a fee.

How each site charges is as recorded in the listing site directory, read on the site’s own pages; each name opens its full listing.

Do search ads make sense for a physiatry practice?

Plan from the healthcare-wide benchmark, as there is no physiatry category: $5.64 (benchmark, LocaliQ, 2026) a click, a conversion rate of 8.09% (benchmark, LocaliQ, 2026), about $69.72 (worked out from the benchmark, LocaliQ, 2026) per lead. Patients do not search for physiatry, so ads must be written around the conditions they do search for, such as back pain or nerve pain.

Those condition searches are crowded with surgeons, chiropractors and pain clinics. A small, specific campaign, for example on nerve testing or non-surgical sciatica care, is a better test than a broad one.

Open the calculator on the healthcare benchmark

Which channels fit a physiatry practice?

Referral relationships are the main channel, and each referral source needs to hear something different: surgeons want non-surgical care tried properly and patients sent back when surgery is needed; therapists want a physician who reads their notes; hospitals want reliable rehabilitation coverage. Explaining the specialty to patients supports all of it.

Questions to ask

• Can your front desk explain in one sentence what a physiatrist does?
• Which surgeons send patients for non-surgical care first, and do they hear back?
• How many inpatient rehabilitation patients follow up in your clinic?
• Are medical director and referral arrangements written and reviewed?

Which rules apply to physiatry marketing?

Physiatry overlaps with spine surgery, pain management and therapy, so the claims and referral rules that govern those fields apply here too, alongside the rules every practice follows.

State medical boards add their own advertising rules, and they vary by state; the state medical board index links each one.

What should a physiatry practice spend on growth?

Most of the investment is referral and hospital work, which the calculator cannot price. The patient-facing search figures above are a contrast; few physiatry patients arrive from an ad.

If you test a condition campaign, run the calculator with your own figures: what a visit collects, the visits a year a musculoskeletal patient makes and how long they stay. Compare the cost per new patient against patients from your best referral source.