550,000 Patients Later: Jared Aron Explains Where Healthcare Clinics Are Losing Revenue

Welcome to Market Movers: Building Brands & Links with Linkifi! Your go-to podcast for transforming your business into an unforgettable brand, where branding meets SEO and link-building. I’m Chris Panteli, Co-Founder and CEO of Linkifi, and I’m joined by my co-host and Co-Founder, Nick Biggs.

In this episode, we’re joined by Jared Aron, co-founder of Coherent Healthcare, to explore why private healthcare providers often lose patients after they have already spent time and money acquiring them. Jared explains how clinics can reduce patient leakage, improve follow-up, track outcomes rather than activity, and combine automation with human support to build a smoother patient journey from first inquiry through treatment and retention.

 

Key Talking Points

✅ From Pokémon Cards to Healthcare Entrepreneurship. Jared says he caught the entrepreneurial bug early, selling Pokémon cards at school before eventually moving into early-stage businesses and healthcare.

✅ Building Medical Hardware Before Running a Clinic. Jared spent around six to seven years working with a team developing a cutting-edge medical laser for skin treatment before transitioning into operating a clinic himself.

✅ Opening a Clinic in the Middle of COVID. Jared’s team opened their clinic in July 2020, an extremely difficult time to launch a face-to-face elective healthcare business.

✅ The Problem Coherent Was Built to Solve. Jared repeatedly saw front-desk teams firefighting patient communications, follow-ups, cancellations, and inquiries. Coherent grew out of the belief that clinics needed a better way to manage patient operations at scale.

✅ Supporting Around 250 Healthcare Providers. Coherent works with approximately 250 healthcare providers across the UK, US, and Canada, primarily in private elective healthcare.

✅ Why Patient Relationships Break as Clinics Scale. A small clinic may know every patient personally, but as the patient base grows into the thousands, the same front-office team cannot maintain every relationship manually.

✅ Technology Has Increased Efficiency but Reduced Personalization. Healthcare systems have become better at storing records and appointment histories, but Jared argues that much of the actual relational intelligence still exists only in staff members’ heads.

✅ The Patient Base Scales Faster Than the Team. Each week adds new patients while previous patients still need support, follow-up, recall, and rebooking. Eventually, staff cannot keep up and patients begin falling through the cracks.

✅ Why Patient Portals Often Miss the Point. Jared argues that many providers invest heavily in portals that patients simply do not want to use. Patients would rather communicate through the channels they already use every day.

✅ Healthcare Is Competing With Netflix and Meta. Clinics are competing for attention against platforms specifically designed to capture it. That means healthcare communication needs to be simple, familiar, and convenient.

✅ Meet Patients Where They Already Are. Jared says patients are already using SMS, WhatsApp, email, and mobile messaging, and clinics should make communication as easy as possible within those environments.

✅ Why Phone Calls Are Becoming a Legacy Channel. Younger patients in particular may ignore calls, especially during the working day. Jared says SMS and WhatsApp can produce dramatically higher response rates.

✅ 5X to 9X Higher Response Rates. Across the practices Coherent supports, Jared says SMS and WhatsApp engagement can generate five, six, seven, and sometimes eight or nine times the response rate of legacy channels.

✅ Why Calling Leads at Lunchtime Fails. Clinics often make follow-up calls when practitioners happen to have time, which may be exactly when the patient is busiest and least likely to answer.

✅ Make Responding Easier Than Ignoring You. Jared’s guiding principle is to reduce friction until engaging with the clinic feels almost easier than not engaging.

✅ Some Patients Need 20+ Touchpoints. Coherent sees examples where patients receive a near-instant initial response yet still require more than 20 points of engagement before moving forward.

✅ Follow Up Without Becoming Salesy. Healthcare should not feel like aggressive sales. Jared describes the process as consultation, discovery, support, and consistently being available when the patient is ready.

✅ Many Clinics Do Not Know Their Conversion Numbers. Jared regularly asks providers how many inquiries they received and how many became new patients. Many can provide the second number but not the first.

✅ Seven Minutes Can Be Enough to Lose the Patient. A clinic may invest heavily to get someone onto the website, only to lose them because the initial patient experience is too slow or impersonal.

✅ 165 Emails Illustrate the Scale Problem. Chris shares that his own IVF journey involved approximately 165 emails with the clinic, demonstrating how much communication a single high-intent healthcare journey can require.

✅ You Cannot Solve This by Hiring More People. Multiply that level of communication across hundreds or thousands of patients and the workload quickly becomes impossible to handle purely with additional staff.

✅ Technology and Humans Have to Work Together. Jared strongly believes that automation is necessary, but sensitive healthcare interactions still require human judgment and empathy.

✅ Stop Tracking Inputs. Track Outcomes. Clinics often measure how many calls, emails, SMS messages, or tasks staff completed. Jared says the only meaningful question is whether the patient actually rebooked, converted, or completed the next step.

✅ The Job Is Not Done When the Message Is Sent. If a patient cancels an appointment, the task is not simply to call or text them. The desired outcome is to get that patient booked back in.

✅ Agentic Workflows and A/B Testing. Chris and Jared discuss how automated workflows can continuously test different follow-up methods and identify which channels and sequences actually get patients back into the journey.

✅ Healthcare Can Learn From E-Commerce. E-commerce companies dedicate entire teams to testing subject lines, engagement rates, and conversion. Jared believes healthcare should bring similar operational discipline to patient communications without turning medical care into retail marketing.

✅ Do Not Send Black Friday-Style Healthcare Offers. Jared repeatedly stresses that healthcare should not become overly sales-driven or promotional simply because the technology exists to automate marketing.

✅ A Sales Desk Is Not a Reception Desk. Jared sees an important distinction between administrative staff and commercially minded patient operations staff. Someone focused only on administration may not naturally respond to an empty calendar by trying to fill it.

✅ Automation Should Feel Invisible. Chris describes the ideal experience as one where confirmations, logins, follow-ups, and systems work seamlessly, while a real person remains accessible whenever the customer needs human help.

✅ The Risk of Going Too Far With AI. Jared warns that an AI-only patient experience could alienate people, especially if patients know they are dealing entirely with automation.

✅ Would You Put Your Family Through It? Jared suggests clinic owners ask whether they would be comfortable putting their own spouse or child through an AI-only patient journey. If they hesitate, that hesitation exposes the weakness in the model.

✅ Human Support Can Protect Lifetime Value. In private dentistry, Jared points out that a single household can potentially represent £100,000 in lifetime value across generations, making poor patient experience incredibly expensive.

 

Notable Quotes & Moments

📌 “Patients scale and your team does not scale with it.”

📌 “You lose a lot of the patient relationship.”

📌 “Nobody cares about patient portals.”

📌 “Your competition is not other providers, it’s Netflix.”

📌 “Email is a dead channel.”

📌 “How do we make this so easy that it’s almost easier to respond than to not respond?”

📌 “The thing you need to track is the outcome of the event.”

📌 “A sales desk is not a reception desk.”

 

About Jared Aron

Jared Aron is the co-founder of Coherent Healthcare, a patient operations company helping private healthcare providers improve how patients move from initial inquiry through booking, treatment, follow-up, recall, and discharge.

Before launching Coherent, Jared spent several years developing medical technology and later helped operate and grow a private clinic after opening its doors during COVID. Today, Coherent works with around 250 healthcare providers across the UK, US, and Canada, with a focus on areas including MSK, dentistry, medical aesthetics, and dermatology.

🔗 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jaredae/ 

🔗 Coherent Healthcare: https://coherenthq.com

 

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