The Patient Said Yes in the Chair. Then They Went Home and Did Nothing. Why Healthcare's Biggest Revenue Problem Isn't Acquisition — It's Follow-Through.
Let's talk about the patient who never came back.
Not the patient who had a bad experience. Not the patient who found another provider. Not the patient who moved away or lost their insurance or decided they didn't like your front desk staff. Those patients are gone for reasons you can identify and, in some cases, fix.
Let's talk about the other patient. The one who sat in your operatory, looked at the intraoral scan on the screen, saw the crack in their own tooth with their own eyes, heard you explain exactly what was happening and exactly what would happen if they didn't treat it, nodded along, said "yeah, that makes sense," scheduled a follow-up appointment on their way out — and then cancelled it three days later. Or just didn't show. Or rescheduled twice and then stopped answering the phone. Or told your front desk they'd "call back when things settle down" and never called back.
That patient understood the diagnosis. They saw the evidence. They agreed with the treatment plan. They had insurance, or they had financing options, or the cost was explained clearly and they didn't push back. There was no clinical objection. There was no logistical barrier. There was no moment in the conversation where they said "I don't believe you" or "I can't afford this" or "I want a second opinion."
They just... didn't do it.
And if you're a dentist, an oral surgeon, a periodontist, an orthodontist, a physician, a specialist of any kind — you know exactly who this patient is. Because this patient isn't an anomaly. This patient is the norm. This patient is, statistically, the majority of your case acceptance problem. And this patient is costing your practice more revenue than every marketing campaign you've ever run has generated.
This is healthcare's biggest unsolved problem. Not getting patients in the door. Getting them to follow through on the care they already agreed they need.
The Numbers Are Brutal
Let's put some dimensions on this, because most providers have a gut sense that case acceptance is a problem but haven't confronted the actual math.
The average dental practice in the United States presents treatment plans that, if fully accepted and completed, would generate significantly more revenue than the practice actually collects. The gap between treatment presented and treatment completed isn't a small inefficiency. It's a chasm. Depending on the study, the source, and the type of practice, somewhere between thirty and fifty percent of recommended treatment goes unscheduled or unfinished. In some practices — particularly those presenting higher-value treatment like implants, full-mouth reconstruction, ortho, or periodontal therapy — the number is worse.
Think about what that means in real terms. If your practice presents two million dollars in treatment over the course of a year and your case acceptance rate — the real rate, not the "they said yes in the chair" rate, but the "they actually showed up, did the work, and paid for it" rate — is fifty-five percent, you're leaving nearly a million dollars on the table. Not because the patients didn't exist. Not because they didn't need the treatment. Not because you didn't diagnose correctly or present effectively. Because they went home, and something happened between your operatory and their follow-through that killed the momentum.
A million dollars. From patients you already saw. Patients you already diagnosed. Patients you already spent chair time with, used materials on, ran scans for, built treatment plans for. The acquisition cost on those patients has already been paid. The marketing that brought them in already worked. The clinical skill that identified their needs already delivered. Everything in the pipeline worked — except the last step. The step where the patient actually does what everyone agrees they should do.
And yet, when most practices feel the revenue pressure from that gap, what do they do? They spend more on acquisition. More Google Ads. More mailers. More new-patient specials. More SEO. More Instagram. More marketing dollars chasing more new patients through the front door to replace the revenue they're losing out the back door from the patients who are already there.
This is like filling a bathtub with the drain open and deciding the solution is a bigger faucet.
Why Patients Stall
Before we talk about the solution, we need to understand the problem with more precision. Because "patients don't follow through" isn't a diagnosis. It's a symptom. And treating symptoms without understanding the underlying cause is — well, you'd never do that clinically. Don't do it operationally either.
Patients who agree to treatment in the chair and then fail to complete it aren't doing so for one reason. They're doing so for a constellation of reasons that interact with each other and compound over time. And the most important thing to understand about these reasons is that almost none of them are clinical.
The Overwhelm Response
The patient sat in your chair for forty-five minutes. They heard terminology they don't use in their daily life. They saw images of their own mouth that they don't know how to interpret the way you do. They were told they need a crown, or a deep cleaning in all four quadrants, or an implant to replace a tooth they've been ignoring for two years, or orthodontic treatment that will take eighteen months. They were given a treatment plan with line items and codes and fees. They were told about insurance coverage and out-of-pocket costs and payment plan options.
They nodded. They said yes. They scheduled.
And then they got in their car, and the overwhelm hit. Not during the appointment — during the appointment, they were in your environment, following your lead, deferring to your expertise, riding the momentum of the interaction. But alone in the car, or at home that night, or the next morning when they're back in their regular life with their regular problems and their regular financial anxieties, the overwhelm arrives. They can't remember exactly what you said about why the crown was necessary versus a filling. They can't remember the difference between the two financing options the treatment coordinator explained. They remember the number — the big number, the out-of-pocket number — and that number is sitting in their stomach like a rock.
They're not rejecting care. They're drowning in information they received once, in an environment that wasn't theirs, under conditions that weren't conducive to retention. And rather than call your office and say "I'm confused and overwhelmed and I need someone to explain this to me again" — which would require admitting vulnerability, which most adults would rather avoid — they just... don't call. They let the appointment slip. They tell themselves they'll deal with it next month. Next month becomes next quarter. Next quarter becomes next year. The tooth gets worse. The treatment gets more expensive. The cycle continues.
The Fear Response
Some patients aren't overwhelmed. They're scared.
Scared of the procedure. Scared of pain. Scared of needles. Scared of being judged for how long they waited. Scared of the cost. Scared of what will happen if the treatment doesn't work. Scared of being in a vulnerable position — literally lying on their back with their mouth open while someone does things they can't see and don't understand.
Dental fear is not a niche problem. It is one of the most common phobias in the adult population. And it doesn't present as "I'm afraid." It presents as cancellation. As no-show. As "something came up." As "I'll call to reschedule." Fear doesn't announce itself. It disguises itself as logistics.
The patient who cancels their extraction appointment "because of a work conflict" may genuinely have a work conflict. Or they may have been lying awake the night before imagining the procedure and decided that a work conflict was a more acceptable reason to cancel than "I'm terrified." You'll never know which one it was, because they'll never tell you. They'll just disappear from your schedule, and your front desk will mark them as a cancellation, and your reactivation postcard will go out in six months, and they'll ignore it, and you'll write off the revenue.
The Financial Paralysis
This one is straightforward but widely misunderstood. The problem isn't usually that the patient can't afford the treatment. The problem is that the patient doesn't know how to think about affording the treatment.
You presented a treatment plan for four thousand dollars. Insurance covers fifteen hundred. The patient's out-of-pocket is twenty-five hundred. You mentioned CareCredit. You mentioned your in-house payment plan. You mentioned that the cost will only increase if they wait because the tooth will deteriorate further.
The patient heard: twenty-five hundred dollars. That's what stuck. Not the financing options — those were explained once, quickly, at the end of an appointment where they were already processing a diagnosis and a treatment plan and images of their own deteriorating tooth. The financing information went in one ear and didn't even make it to the other ear. It evaporated on contact.
Now they're at home, and all they have is the number. Twenty-five hundred dollars. And they don't have twenty-five hundred dollars sitting in their checking account — most Americans don't — so they do what most people do when confronted with a large expense they don't know how to pay for: nothing. They freeze. They avoid. They tell themselves they'll figure it out later. Later never comes.
The financial information was available. It was presented. But it wasn't retained. And a piece of information that's presented but not retained is functionally identical to information that was never presented at all.
The Inertia Problem
Finally, there's plain inertia. The patient's tooth doesn't hurt right now. The gum disease isn't causing symptoms they can feel. The cracked tooth is functional today. The misalignment isn't an emergency. Human beings are extraordinarily good at deprioritizing problems that aren't causing immediate pain. This is not a character flaw. It's an evolutionary feature. Our brains are wired to allocate attention and resources to immediate threats, not to slow-moving problems that might become serious in six months or two years.
You showed them the scan. You explained the trajectory. You told them what happens if they wait. And they believed you — in that moment, in your chair, with the evidence on the screen. But belief fades. Urgency dissipates. The compelling image of their cracked tooth on your monitor is replaced by the compelling reality of their kid's soccer schedule, their mortgage payment, their car that needs new brakes, their boss who's been difficult lately, their mother who needs help, their life that is full of immediate demands that push your treatment plan further and further down the priority list until it falls off entirely.
This isn't a patient problem. It's a human problem. And the solution isn't to present more aggressively in the chair, or to add more urgency to the close, or to train your treatment coordinator to overcome objections more effectively. Those approaches treat the appointment as the entire battlefield. It's not. The appointment is the first five minutes of a much longer engagement — and right now, most practices are abandoning the field after those first five minutes and hoping the patient carries the momentum on their own.
They don't. That's the whole point.
The Tool Nobody's Using
Here's where we pivot. Because there is a tool that addresses every single one of these stall-out factors — overwhelm, fear, financial paralysis, inertia — and almost no healthcare practice is using it. Not because it's expensive. Not because it's complicated. Not because it requires new technology or new staff or a new patient management system.
It's marketing. But not the kind of marketing you're thinking of.
Not acquisition marketing. Not the Google Ads and the mailers and the new-patient specials and the SEO and the social media campaigns that are designed to get strangers to walk through your front door for the first time. That marketing has its place. It works. It's important.
But it's not the marketing that solves the follow-through problem.
The marketing that solves the follow-through problem is post-appointment, personalized, educational content delivered to patients who have already been seen, already been diagnosed, and already been presented with a treatment plan — at the exact moment when their overwhelm, fear, financial confusion, or inertia is most likely to prevent them from moving forward.
Imagine this.
The Email That Changes Everything
A patient comes in for a comprehensive exam. You diagnose moderate periodontal disease. You present a treatment plan for scaling and root planing — four quadrants, two appointments, with a cost that insurance partially covers. The patient nods, schedules, and leaves.
Forty-eight hours later — not six months later on a reactivation postcard, not three weeks later in a generic "we miss you" email, but forty-eight hours later, while the appointment is still fresh and the anxiety is just beginning to build — the patient receives an email.
Not a reminder email. Not a "confirm your appointment" email. Not a promotional email about teeth whitening specials. A real email. A helpful email. An email that says:
"Hi [patient name]. After your visit on Tuesday, Dr. [name] recommended scaling and root planing to treat the gum disease we found during your exam. We know that can sound overwhelming — most patients have questions after an appointment like this, and that's completely normal. We put together a short guide that explains exactly what periodontal disease is, why Dr. [name] recommended this specific treatment, and what the procedure actually involves step by step. You can read it here. And if you're concerned about cost, we have a page that walks through your financing options — including some that let you break the total into monthly payments that are smaller than you might expect. You can see those options here. If you have questions about anything — the diagnosis, the procedure, the cost, the scheduling — call us or reply to this email. We're here to help you figure this out."
Read that again. Look at what it does.
It acknowledges the overwhelm. It normalizes it. "Most patients have questions" — this tells the patient they're not stupid for being confused. They're normal.
It re-explains the diagnosis. Not in clinical jargon delivered once in a chair, but in plain language, in a resource they can read at their own pace, in their own home, as many times as they need to. The information they couldn't retain during the appointment is now available to them permanently, on demand.
It addresses the fear. "What the procedure actually involves step by step" — this is the information that dissolves fear. Fear thrives on ambiguity. When a patient doesn't know what's going to happen, their imagination fills in the worst-case scenario. A clear, honest, step-by-step explanation of the procedure replaces imagination with information. It doesn't eliminate fear entirely, but it reduces it from paralyzing to manageable.
It solves the financial paralysis. Not by restating the total cost — which is what the patient is already fixated on — but by directing them to financing information presented clearly, separately, in a format they can review without pressure. "Monthly payments that are smaller than you might expect" — this reframes the financial conversation from a lump sum to a manageable monthly expense. It's the same information the treatment coordinator provided in the office, but delivered at a moment when the patient can actually process it.
It creates a pathway back. "Call us or reply to this email" — this gives the patient an easy, low-friction way to re-engage. They don't have to initiate contact from scratch. They don't have to admit they're confused or scared. They just have to reply to an email. The barrier to re-engagement drops from "I have to call a dental office and explain why I've been avoiding them" to "I can type a quick question into my phone."
This is marketing. But it's not acquisition marketing. It's care-continuation marketing. It's using the same tools — email, content, personalization, strategic timing — that every practice already uses to attract new patients, and redeploying them to retain and convert the patients you've already seen.
The Content Infrastructure
That email doesn't work without content behind it. The links in that email need to go somewhere — and where they go matters enormously.
This is where most practices fall short, because most practice websites are built for acquisition. The homepage talks about how welcoming the office is. The services page lists procedures with stock photos. The about page has a photo of the doctor and a paragraph about their education. The blog — if there is one — has three posts from two years ago about the importance of flossing.
None of that content serves the patient who just got diagnosed with periodontal disease and is sitting at home trying to decide whether to go through with treatment.
What that patient needs is a content library — a collection of resources, built over time, that addresses the specific diagnoses your practice makes and the specific concerns your patients have after they leave your office. Not generic health information copied from WebMD. Not clinical descriptions written for other providers. Content written for your patients, about the procedures you perform, addressing the fears and questions and financial concerns that you hear every day in your operatory.
Think about what that library looks like for a general dental practice.
A page — or a series of pages — explaining periodontal disease in plain language. What it is. What causes it. What happens if you don't treat it. What the treatment involves. What recovery looks like. Written by your practice, in your voice, with your specific approach to care.
A page explaining crowns. Why you'd need one versus a filling. What the procedure involves. How long it takes. What it feels like. What the crown is made of. How long it lasts. The honest answers to the questions patients are Googling at eleven at night when they should be sleeping.
A page explaining implants. A page explaining root canals. A page explaining orthodontic options. A page explaining each major category of treatment that your practice provides — not as a sales pitch, but as a genuine educational resource designed to help a confused, overwhelmed, possibly scared patient understand what's happening and why.
And critically — a page explaining financing. Not buried in a footer link. Not a PDF download. A real, prominent, clearly written page that walks patients through every payment option available to them, with examples, with monthly payment estimates, with information about how to apply, with reassurance that financing is normal and common and nothing to be embarrassed about.
This content library serves two purposes simultaneously.
First, it's the destination for those post-appointment emails. When a patient gets diagnosed with periodontal disease and receives that email forty-eight hours later, the link takes them to your periodontal disease page — your page, on your website, written in your voice, building trust in your practice. They're not being sent to WebMD. They're not being sent to a generic health portal. They're staying in your ecosystem, engaging with your brand, building familiarity and trust with your practice even after they've left your office.
Second — and this is the part that connects back to traditional marketing — this content ranks in search engines. The patient who just got diagnosed at your practice isn't the only person searching for information about periodontal treatment or crown procedures or implant costs. Thousands of people in your area are searching for this information every month. When your content ranks for those searches, it drives new patients to your website — patients who discover your practice through your educational content, who arrive already perceiving you as an expert and a trusted resource, and who are more likely to book and follow through than patients who find you through a generic ad.
The content library does acquisition and retention simultaneously. It's the blog post that a prospective new patient finds on Google and the resource that an existing patient receives in a follow-up email. Same content. Two purposes. Double the return.
Why This Isn't Happening
If this approach is so effective, why isn't every practice doing it?
Because healthcare marketing has been defined — by the agencies that sell it and the practices that buy it — almost exclusively as acquisition. New patients. New leads. New calls. The entire marketing conversation in dentistry and healthcare revolves around how many new patients you're generating per month and what your cost per acquisition is.
These are important metrics. But they're incomplete. They measure the front of the funnel and ignore the back. They count how many patients walked in and don't count how many walked out without completing treatment. They celebrate the new patient who booked a cleaning and ignore the existing patient who was diagnosed with a five-thousand-dollar treatment plan and disappeared.
The acquisition obsession creates a blind spot. Practices invest thousands of dollars per month in marketing to attract new patients and invest zero dollars in marketing to the patients they've already seen. The new patient gets a beautiful website experience, a targeted Google ad, a compelling social media post, and a seamless booking flow. The existing patient who just received a life-changing diagnosis gets a robocall appointment reminder and a postcard in six months.
The imbalance is staggering. And it's costing practices far more than they realize.
Consider the economics. A new patient acquisition might cost a practice anywhere from a hundred to five hundred dollars, depending on the market, the channel, and the competition. That patient comes in for an exam. You diagnose treatment. They don't follow through. You've spent three hundred dollars in marketing, plus the chair time and materials for the exam, and generated zero treatment revenue from it.
Now consider the alternative. That same patient, after the exam, receives a sequence of personalized follow-up content that costs almost nothing to deliver — because the content already exists on your website and the email is automated. The content addresses their specific concerns, re-explains their diagnosis, walks them through financing, and gives them an easy path back to your schedule. They read the periodontal disease page. They click through to the financing page. They see that the monthly payment is a fraction of what they'd feared. They reply to the email with a question. Your treatment coordinator answers it. They rebook. They complete treatment.
The cost of that conversion? Negligible. The infrastructure — the content, the email automation, the integration with your practice management system — is a one-time investment that serves every patient after it's built. The marginal cost of sending one more personalized email to one more diagnosed patient is essentially zero.
You just converted a patient you'd already acquired, using content you'd already created, at a cost that's a rounding error compared to the revenue the treatment generates.
That's the math. And it's the math that should be reshaping how healthcare practices think about marketing.
Building the System
Let's get practical. Here's what the system looks like when it's built and running.
Step One: Map Your Diagnoses to Content
Make a list of the twenty most common diagnoses or treatment recommendations your practice makes. Crowns. Scaling and root planing. Implants. Extractions. Orthodontics. Night guards. Whatever your practice does most frequently. These are your content priorities.
For each diagnosis, identify the three to five most common reasons patients stall. You already know what they are — you hear them every day. "I need to think about it." "I need to talk to my spouse." "I'm not sure my insurance covers it." "I'm scared of the procedure." "It doesn't hurt right now, so maybe I can wait." Each of those stall reasons is a content topic.
Step Two: Create the Content
For each major diagnosis, create a dedicated page or resource on your website that explains the condition, the recommended treatment, what the procedure involves, what recovery looks like, and why waiting makes it worse. Write it in plain language. Write it for the patient who is sitting at home at ten o'clock at night, anxious, confused, and trying to decide whether to go through with it.
Create a comprehensive financing page that explains every payment option your practice offers — insurance, payment plans, third-party financing, hardship options, whatever is available. Include examples. Include estimated monthly payments for common treatment costs. Make it impossible for a patient to leave your website without understanding that affordable options exist.
This content doesn't need to be created all at once. Start with your top five diagnoses. Build from there. One page per week. In two months, you have a content library that covers the vast majority of your case acceptance gap.
Step Three: Build the Email Sequences
Work with your marketing team — or your agency — to create email sequences that are triggered by specific diagnoses or treatment plan presentations. When a patient is diagnosed with periodontal disease, they enter the periodontal sequence. When a patient is presented with an implant treatment plan, they enter the implant sequence.
Each sequence should deliver two to four emails over a two-to-three-week period following the appointment. The first email, sent within forty-eight hours, does what we described above — acknowledges the diagnosis, normalizes the overwhelm, provides links to educational content and financing information, and opens a clear line of communication.
Subsequent emails can address specific stall factors. The second email might focus on the "what happens if I wait" question, linking to content about the progression of untreated conditions. The third email might feature a brief, relatable patient story — not a testimonial ad, but a genuine narrative about a real patient who had the same fears and is glad they moved forward. The fourth might be a gentle, warm invitation to call or reply with any remaining questions, with a direct line to your treatment coordinator.
These aren't sales emails. They're care emails. They're an extension of the care you provided in the operatory — delivered digitally, at the patient's own pace, on the patient's own terms. The tone is compassionate, not pushy. Informative, not promotional. The goal isn't to close a sale. The goal is to help a scared or confused person make the best decision for their health.
Step Four: Integrate with Your Practice Management System
The emails need to be triggered by real events in your practice management system — a diagnosis code entered, a treatment plan presented, an appointment scheduled and then cancelled. This integration is what makes the system personalized rather than generic. The patient who was diagnosed with periodontal disease gets periodontal content, not a generic "complete your treatment" reminder. The patient who was presented with an implant plan gets implant content, not a mass email about your new-patient special.
Most modern practice management systems can integrate with email marketing platforms. If yours can't, it can usually export data that a marketing platform can import. The technical integration is solvable — it just needs to be prioritized.
Step Five: Measure What Matters
Track the metrics that tell you whether the system is working. Not open rates — open rates tell you whether your subject line was good, not whether your content helped a patient follow through. Track the metrics that connect to revenue: treatment acceptance rates, time from diagnosis to completed treatment, reactivation rates for patients who had previously stalled, and revenue from treatment that was presented, stalled, and then completed after the email sequence.
Compare these metrics to your pre-system baseline. The improvement won't be subtle.
This Is How Care Needs to Move
There's a bigger principle here that extends beyond email sequences and content libraries. It's about recognizing that the patient experience doesn't end when the patient walks out your door — and that the patient's decision-making process doesn't end when they nod in your chair.
Healthcare has traditionally treated the appointment as the unit of care. The patient comes in. You examine them. You diagnose. You present a treatment plan. You answer questions. You do your best to earn their trust and address their concerns. And then they leave, and what happens next is up to them.
But what happens next shouldn't be up to them — not entirely. Not because patients aren't capable of making their own decisions. Because patients are making those decisions in an information vacuum. They're making them without the resources they need. They're making them while overwhelmed, confused, afraid, or financially paralyzed. And the practice that diagnosed them — the entity with the most knowledge, the most context, and the most ability to help — goes silent at the exact moment when the patient needs support the most.
Post-appointment content marketing isn't a sales tactic. It's an extension of care. It's the recognition that a diagnosis delivered once, verbally, in a clinical environment, under stressful conditions, is not sufficient to support a complex healthcare decision. It's the recognition that patients need information delivered on their terms — in their home, at their own pace, in language they understand, through channels they're comfortable with, at the moment when their specific concerns are most acute.
The practice that sends a patient home after a five-thousand-dollar diagnosis with nothing but a treatment plan printout and a "call us if you have questions" is leaving that patient alone with their fear, their confusion, and their financial anxiety. The practice that follows up with personalized, empathetic, educational content — content that meets the patient where they are and gives them what they need to make an informed decision — is practicing medicine the way medicine should be practiced. Completely. Continuously. Beyond the walls of the operatory.
The tools to do this exist. The email platforms exist. The content strategies exist. The practice management integrations exist. The patients who need this support are already in your system, already diagnosed, already one follow-up email away from converting from a stalled treatment plan to a completed one.
The question isn't whether this works. It's whether your practice is going to build it.
Frequently Asked Questions
Isn't This Just Email Marketing? We Already Send Appointment Reminders.
Appointment reminders and post-appointment care content are fundamentally different tools. A reminder says "you have an appointment Tuesday at 2pm." It's logistical. Post-appointment care content says "we understand your diagnosis might feel overwhelming — here's a resource that explains exactly what's going on and what your options are." It's educational, empathetic, and personalized to the patient's specific diagnosis. The difference in patient response is dramatic because the email is meeting a fundamentally different need.
We Don't Have Time to Write All This Content. Where Do We Start?
Start with your biggest revenue gap. Look at which treatment categories have the highest rate of stalling or non-completion. If you present a lot of periodontal treatment that doesn't get scheduled, start there. If implant cases are where patients disappear, start there. Build one diagnosis page and one email sequence. Test it. Measure the results. Then build the next one. You don't need a complete content library on day one. You need to start with the category that's costing you the most, prove the model works, and expand from there.
Won't Patients Feel Like We're Pressuring Them?
Only if the content reads like a sales pitch. And it shouldn't. The tone of post-appointment care content should be exactly what you'd say to a patient if they called your office with questions — warm, helpful, informative, patient. "We know this can feel overwhelming" is not pressure. "Here's a resource that explains your options" is not pressure. "Call us if you have questions" is not pressure. Patients don't resent being helped. They resent being sold to. The distinction is in the tone, the intent, and the content itself.
How Do We Personalize Emails If We Have Hundreds of Patients?
Automation. You're not writing individual emails to individual patients. You're creating email sequences — templates — that are triggered by specific diagnosis codes or treatment plan categories in your practice management system. The personalization comes from the trigger, not from manual effort. A patient diagnosed with periodontal disease automatically receives the periodontal sequence. A patient presented with an implant plan automatically receives the implant sequence. The system does the personalization. You build it once and it runs continuously.
What Kind of Results Should We Expect?
The results vary by practice, by patient population, and by how well the content addresses the specific stall factors in your patient base. But practices that implement systematic post-appointment follow-up content consistently see meaningful improvements in treatment acceptance rates, reductions in stalled treatment plans, and significant revenue recovery from patients who would otherwise have disappeared. The investment is modest — primarily content creation and email platform setup — and the returns compound over time as the content library grows and the automation matures. The patients who convert through this system are patients you've already acquired and already diagnosed. The incremental cost of converting them is a fraction of the cost of replacing them with a new acquisition.