What happens to your revenue after the global period ends?
For most bariatric practices, the answer is: nothing. The 90-day window closes, the bundled payment is collected, and the economic relationship with the patient is effectively over. But the patient’s metabolic journey continues for years — and so does the revenue opportunity you’re not capturing.
How many of your post-op patients are still engaged with your practice at month twelve?
The typical bariatric program loses contact with 40 to 60 percent of its surgical patients within the first year. They’re not unhappy. They’re not non-compliant. They simply have no structured reason to come back — and no one is reaching out to give them one.
What is the lifetime value of a bariatric patient to your practice today?
For most programs, the answer is the surgical reimbursement plus a handful of covered follow-up visits. That’s it. But a bariatric patient’s clinical needs — nutritional support, lab monitoring, behavioral coaching, supplement regimens, body composition tracking — extend for years. Every one of those needs is a service someone will pay for. Right now, that someone isn’t you.
If you enrolled 100 post-op patients in a $150/month wellness program, what would that do to your bottom line?
$15,000 per month. $180,000 per year.
From patients who already trust you, already know your staff, and already need the support. No new marketing spend. No new patient acquisition cost. Just a structured offer for patients who are actively looking for ongoing guidance and aren’t finding it from you.
How much revenue are you leaving on the table by not billing for remote patient monitoring?
Medicare reimburses $120 to $150 per patient per month for qualifying RPM services. Commercial payers are increasingly following suit. The infrastructure is a cellular-connected scale and a clinical workflow to review the data. The patients who need monitoring the most — your post-op bariatric population — are already in your system. They just haven’t been enrolled.
When a patient needs GLP-1 management at month nine, are they coming to you — or going back to their PCP?
Adjunct GLP-1 prescribing for post-surgical patients is one of the fastest-growing clinical needs in bariatric medicine. The surgeon who performed the procedure is the most qualified person to manage it. But if the practice doesn’t have a structured follow-up program, the patient defaults to their primary care provider — and that prescribing revenue, along with the clinical relationship, moves to someone else’s P&L.
What would it mean for your practice if every surgery you performed generated 18 to 24 months of additional recurring revenue?
Not theoretical revenue. Not “if we could just get patients to come back.” Actual, structured, billable recurring revenue — from remote monitoring, from wellness programs, from supplement dispensing, from nutritional coaching, from GLP-1 management. The practices that have built this model aren’t working harder. They’ve just stopped letting the most valuable part of the patient relationship expire at day 90.
Do you know which of your post-op patients stopped weighing themselves three weeks ago?
If you’re billing for remote patient monitoring, you need continuous data to substantiate claims. A patient whose connected scale goes silent for three weeks isn’t just a clinical concern — it’s a revenue gap. The practices that catch these gaps in real time keep their RPM revenue intact. The ones that don’t find out at the end of the billing cycle, when it’s too late.
The Opportunity
These aren’t rhetorical questions. They’re revenue lines — ones that the highest-performing bariatric practices in the country have already started building. The post-surgical patient isn’t the end of the economic relationship. Treated correctly, it’s the beginning of the most profitable part.
Get in Touch
If you found yourself doing math while reading this page, that’s a good sign. The gap between where your post-op revenue is and where it could be is almost certainly larger than you think — and closing it doesn’t require more patients, more marketing, or more staff. It requires a model.
Talk to Ryan about post-surgical revenue