Lunula laser ROI: is it worth the investment for your clinic?

Reported annual returns from small, medium and large Australian and New Zealand clinics running the Lunula laser, and what drives the difference.

Adding any therapeutic device to a clinic is a financial decision before it is a clinical one. The figures below come from a survey of Lunula clients across Australia and New Zealand, grouped by the socioeconomic profile of the clinic's location — which turned out to be the strongest predictor of both pricing and marketing spend.

What goes into the calculation

• Price of a treatment package — typically a course of sessions plus follow-up reviews, sold as a bundle.
• New patients acquired per month.
• One-off marketing set-up cost.
• Ongoing monthly promotional spend.
• Monthly finance cost of the device.
• Local pricing norms and patient demographics.

Reported annual returns

Interestingly, higher marketing spend did not translate into proportionally more new patients. New-patient volume stayed relatively steady across the groups; what changed was the price the local market would carry, and therefore the return.

What the strongest performers did differently

Two habits came up repeatedly. The first was expectation management — spending real consult time explaining how nail fungus spreads, how reinfection happens, and that severe cases may need more than the standard course. The second was bundling: patients billed per session attended less reliably than patients who bought a package, which hurt both outcomes and revenue.

Owners also flagged the back-office side: no consumables to stock or reconcile, minimal downtime, a two-year warranty, and a loan device from Rehacare if a unit ever needs repair so treatment schedules keep running.

Figures are averages reported by surveyed clinics and are not a projection or guarantee of returns for any individual practice.

Working the numbers for your own practice

The arithmetic is simple enough to do on a napkin. Take your package price, multiply by the number of fungal-nail patients you realistically convert each month, and subtract monthly marketing plus the device finance payment. Because there are no consumables, almost everything above that line is contribution margin — which is why the break-even point usually sits at a low single-digit number of patients per month rather than a full appointment book.

• Break-even is typically reached at roughly three to five package patients per month, depending on price point and finance terms.
• Sessions run unattended, so a treatment can sit alongside routine care without consuming practitioner time.
• Debridement, review consults and home-care products add revenue on top of the package price.
• Existing patient files are the cheapest acquisition channel — most clinics already have hundreds of documented onychomycosis presentations.

Where clinics leave money on the table

• Selling single sessions instead of a full course, which hurts both attendance and outcomes.
• No baseline photography, so patients cannot see the progress they are paying for and drop out early.
• Never recalling past patients who were previously told nothing much could be done.
• Reception staff who cannot confidently answer 'does it hurt?' and 'how long until I see something?'.
• No six- and twelve-month review built into the package, which is where referrals come from.