Doctors Became the Product. Clinics Became the Distributors, with Oli Capel of Medico Digital E51 BOAC

0:00The worst case is where it's effectively in the hands of a medical secretary, patients not available on Tuesday, they're just taking it to the competitor. You're literally paying for your competitor's lead. You've done your advertising, you've done your job of actually getting in front of a patient, generating inquiry, and you've shipped it off to your competitor because it's out of your hand. People are booking multiple consultations with different providers and then cancelling other ones, which is crazy. there seems to be more and more pressure on consultants to be mini influencers celebrities or creating video content being up there and social having a social presence and let's be honest that's not why people went into that industry at all if you are a patient and you become aware of a healthcare need that you have are you sitting around on facebook or instagram waiting to be targeting with an ad that says actually yeah you're right I do have fibroids maybe you should inquire

0:59Jared Aron: and get an f*** you just aren't. Came in and consolidated the lot very quickly put it under one brand name and you could talk about the scale in which you operate. Have a headless CMS system where you can pull all the content very quickly from one place you're not cannibalizing yourself have a very consolidated search strategy and a way to capture online booking. That would be how you one month.

1:32Great.

1:32Jared Aron: So we're back for another episode of The Business of a Clinic. Really excited to be joined by Ali Oliver, who is the founder and chief executive at Medico Digital. Yes, that's right. Thank you for having me. Really glad to be here. So give us, I just had the benefit of the off-camera version of the production, so maybe give us the on-camera version so how did you end up here being in this chair okay I mean a really long story if you want to yeah it is so my life in the world of healthcare communication started working in Spire Healthcare within their business development team actually one of the Bristol hospitals okay so part of my role there was to support consultants in their private practice and help them to raise their online presence and they'd come knock on the door and ask if I could help and I knew a man that could build a website and that is basically where it all started.

2:25Also at the time there was an absolute massive need for better online communication for patients specifically because when you go online and you're in need of care it's a minefield. It often is you just need to find a provider that can take care of you or help you with your particular health care need and sometimes it's just really challenging to know who is trustworthy, who should you go to, there are so many options out there how do you book all of these sorts of things so it was two pronged it was opportunistic in the sense of i had the market there but also i will really want to make a difference and that's very much part of our philosophy and our ethos at medico is to support patients in helping to find good health care online and equally helping health care organizations to connect with patients

3:18Jared Aron: there are quite a few things i want to ask about but before i do is have the benefit of knowledge in advance of the conversation can you tell us just a little bit about where is the company now where is the firm now take us into your a little bit of the jerk this the growth story yeah so we worked with individual practitioners clinicians support this is the respiratory physician the Yeah, absolutely. Orthopaedic surgeon, cosmetic surgeons. And that, it grew very organically to work with clinics, then hospitals, private hospital groups. We've done some work in the public sector as well. We've branched out and we've worked with medical device manufacturers, a little bit in life science, consumer health and pharma as well.

4:01some of them a little bit less so we specialize more so in patient engagement acquisition how do you get in front of patients whereas a lot of pharma and traditional kind of healthcare communication is probably more targeted towards doctors how do you capture that audience which is a very difficult one to do so we're more on the d2c side we have been going for 11 years now 11 and a half years so founded in 2015 we have grown to size relatively small medium size agencies we have about 20-25 individuals last year we set up in australia so started to open up that market and yeah we provide a broad range of digital marketing services to reach and engage with patients online so that would be anything from building a accessible highly converted website time to how do you become visible online from a search engine perspective from an AI perspective do a lot of paid media advertising and outreach those sorts of things as well so kind of anything and everything to help healthcare organizations broaden their reach

5:10Jared Aron: and get in front of patients okay got it so that as I understand more about the journey I think the one of the things I'd be curious to understand is on a personal level I can see how you were doing this in-house at Spire. And that opened up the itch to say, hold on, there's a sort of tunnel to go and explore here. And that takes you down now 11 and a half years later, you've built an agency quite successfully with international presence, et cetera. On a personal level, was the goal to be in healthcare patient-facing D2C marketing? What was the thing that has pulled you into and helped you stay in the space?

5:47It's a fascinating area of medicine, isn't it? It's one of the most important industries in the world, I think. And you can go as far as saying in terms of healthcare communications and the promotion of health, what better thing is there, especially as AI starts to take over the world and jobs become less and less room? What can we do as a purpose as individuals? It is to really is to promote good health amongst all of us and help people when they're in need of care. So I think if you really deep down, I have a genuine interest in health care, the developments, the innovations that happen, and I'm lucky enough to be at the coalface and see what's happening there.

6:27I have some amazing clients doing some amazing things. But also, it's amazing to be able to help progress some of those innovations and really be part of that. And sometimes you have to squint. But ultimately, if we are helping patients to find the right healthcare providers and be treated, then I feel proud for that reason.

6:48Jared Aron: I'm not going to ask you about the squinting moment for a later conversation. Okay, that makes a lot of sense. So I can see also this idea of nexus information that you're seeing on the D2C side. You work with other players in the space, maybe more practitioner-facing, even if that's a smaller part of the work that you do. So I understand that you have a rounded view across specialty, across provider, across patient. One of the things that we often come up against also being a supplier to healthcare is this idea that innovation and healthcare transformation is a clinical issue. Whereas the side of the house that you're on, that we're on as well, is a business issue, is a commercial issue.

7:28Jared Aron: We believe it's very strongly linked to the clinical issues. but I'm curious to understand either your personal and or the firm's position on healthcare has a clinical problem, healthcare has a business problem, healthcare has both problems. What is your outlook on the matter? Absolutely has both, doesn't it? But on the business side of things, I'm a person that I guess I'm impatient by nature and I cannot stand bureaucracy, and particularly in the public sector in healthcare, it's the worst for that. and there is a lot of that in large-scale pharma as well. And I think just from the kind, there are a lot of business issues that exist within healthcare that kind of get overlooked.

8:10And I think it's interesting because there are so many, think about AI as a technological revolution that's going on right now. There's some really incredible stuff happening on the clinical side. And on the business side, it feels like there's bizarrely more red tape and it's slower to adopt. And it's where there is almost just as much need because it's so slow to adopt new technologies, the sector. It's just it lags behind. It's with education almost as a sector. It's very institutionalized and stuck in its ways. So I guess in many ways for us as an agency, it's helped us to grow and be agile and all of those things.

8:53Whereas I think if we were in, for example, e-commerce, I think we would be less unique in that respect. Does that answer your question?

9:02Jared Aron: I think it does. And I'm particularly interested in the last one because one of the latter points you made was around healthcare being a slow technology adoption sector. Housing, good example. Education, good example. These are the big pillars of society. Everything else is, there's that great graph in the U.S. of the cost of different goods and services and how the cost of a flat screen television over the last 20 years has gone from hyper luxury to totally off the shelf. And there are a lot of things where technology has brought the cost curve down. And then there are these other industries which almost seem to behave independent of technology.

9:38Jared Aron: Cost of education, this is the U.S. cost of education is going up, healthcare costs going up, everything's going up. So I think I'd be curious to understand, is it a technology adoption issue? But do you think that it's that the healthcare provider economy struggles to adopt technology? If you have to start to open up and pick it. There's probably multiple factors, I think. There's a little bit of the kind of stuck in the ways. It's amazing that we're in kind of 2026 and all the incredible stuff you can do with AI now. and yet we seem unable as an industry to be able to implement online booking.

10:17Such a simple thing. And I say that with a caveat because I do understand there is patient records at this end of it. It's not like ordering a pizza. I do get that. But it's a technology that's been around for years. It isn't impossible to do so. I think in healthcare we have massively siloed, fragmented data sources which are very locked down and don't join up. So people are reticent to do that and try and join up those dots. I think there is maybe a lack of, on the business side specifically, I'd say, in terms of kind of innovators and entrepreneurs, it feels like there is less of those people that exist.

10:55And I don't know why. There are some amazing organisations doing some cool stuff, but probably less. Yeah, it's hard. I think there's lots. It's the regulations, it's the just lack of kind of appetite or being really risk adverse. So it's the traditional thing that you'll see from a public sector perspective is we need to be able to prove that it's going to, we need to be able to demonstrate it's going to deliver return on investment and we have to build a business case for it for more investment in digital. and then at the same time they're unable to do that because they don't have any way to be able to track the success of any digital investment they made they don't have any kind of online tracking to be able to say we saw this patient came from this ad that we ran over here and we converted them and they went forward and had this dream and we don't have a crm system they all everything is recorded in spreadsheets all of this sort of stuff goes on all the time and then there There is this rhetoric of it must be done for this price.

11:59Or if we want to get more investment, we have to prove the value of it. But you're unable to prove the value of it because you've never done it before. And if you did try to invest more in it, you wouldn't be able to track it and actually get all the way through.

12:11Jared Aron: It's interesting. I used to run a clinic before Coherent in private electives, so medical aesthetics, dermatology. And we set up a flagship clinic in London not far from here. And I don't come from a healthcare background in the sense that I'm not from a family of doctors, etc. etc and i remember very clearly when setting up clinic needing to make decisions about what suppliers to work with and what technology solutions to buy yeah um it was absolutely terrible it was a horrific process and it was so funny because by comparison i also had to buy medical devices yeah medical devices which if you put software costs against hardware cost a medical device you're laying out 300 000 pounds yeah in one go and a software cost you're signing up to 300 pounds a month.

12:57Yeah.

12:58Jared Aron: And it was so much easier to buy the medical device. So much easier to buy the program. It's mad, isn't it? It's absolutely wild. And do you know what? I see it. The UK is a more mature market, particularly in the private healthcare sense. On the Australian side, so for example, one of the biggest private hospital providers in Sydney, in terms of trying to raise their presence and try to get in front of patients, running an ad campaign, a Google ad campaign, for spending$5 a day. $5, they can get two or three clicks a day. And at the same time, to your point, the investment in technology and equipment and everything, the infrastructure, millions.

13:41Where's the logic there? It doesn't make any sense to me.

13:44Jared Aron: So when we work with Linux now, one of the places that we often start is looking at the lead funnel, not from a marketing perspective but more so what happens when they hit the front desk yeah so people are inquiring what happens next yeah and we see versions of this so we have a clinic where they are running a meta ad campaign yeah and in the ad inside the actual qualifications we know more about this than i do but inside the actual ad they put a question says are you willing to travel to the clinic this is where we're based and a whole lot of people say no and they and then And they still go through and they say, oh, all these leads.

14:23Jared Aron: 30 % of these people told you they were not going to come visit you before they even submitted the thing. As someone who come into the clinic space, what I was finding clinic, it was hugely challenging because it was never my full mind share. Even as a commercial person rather than a medical person, you're so drinking from the fire hose just trying to run the day-to-day. It's a service business. It's like running a restaurant every day. Doors need to open. Patients need to be seen. You're in this almost impossible to get off hamster wheel and then you almost can see this problem. Say, hold on, I'm aware of the fact that there's a problem that when a lead inquires, I have to add it to a Google sheet and then after I take it to the Google sheet, I have to add it to my PMS.

15:09Jared Aron: I know this problem exists and I just can't do anything about it. Where's the button that solves the problem? I just can't find it. Do you see this with your practice? All the time. And I think that, to your previous point, is a lot of these businesses, they become quite successful just being clinician-led. And clinicians can be amazing brains and individuals and so good on the clinical side and on the patient side in terms of their manner and everything. But when it comes to running a business, it's different. And there are elements of digital in particular. Digital is so fast-paced, so fast-moving, that it's very challenging for you to keep up with that.

15:46So where we tend to find that we probably have most success with healthcare organisations nowadays is when they have an investment in marketing personnel that we can work with. They've effectively matured to a point where they realise there has to be a certain level of investment in that infrastructure. So it becomes less of an education piece. But yeah, we still pick up clients all the time and it's no CRM system. Everything's on spreadsheets. We have massive holes in data and understanding. and at the same time huge investments going in various different ad campaigns and not knowing where anything comes from is mind-boggling there's a private hospital up in edinburgh that we don't

16:25Jared Aron: work with we tried to work with them didn't end up working with them and the main reason for that was before we started the conversation they had spent seven months implementing with a consultant agency thing a sales force implementation yeah so how's that going and the cfo or the ops director or someone's face just melted. We've spent£100 ,000 implementing this beast of a solution. Yeah, you don't need it. We can't use. Nobody can use it. We don't have the in-house expertise. We don't have to ever want to change something. We have to go back to the consultant. It's costing us tens of thousands of pounds a month.

16:58Yeah. It's really unfortunate, isn't it? And there are a lot of poor technology decisions that get made because you don't need... Salesforce is a Rolls-Royce of a CRM system. Great for an enterprise organisation, but you don't need it. There's a lot of these private hospitals actually now that have these monolithic CRM systems, CMS systems as well, that just aren't equipped for what was needed from a patient perspective, being agile, having the in-house expertise to make. Every time they need to make a small change on it, it's thousands of pounds of development time. And they're all moving away from it.

17:30It's all going more into headless CMS environments and much more kind of bespoke built CMS tools, which that is an advantage from an AI perspective is that it's leveled the playing field. Then you can basically build your own system tailored to what you need and not be reliant on massive vendor locking with a huge technology firm. It's interesting. So the building piece, we talk about this quite a lot.

17:55Jared Aron: And we also speak with practitioners and clinics, exec operands, heads of department, who have made decisions to try and build things themselves. Yeah. And we've heard it both ways. We've heard it go really badly. I'd be curious to hear your thoughts on it because what we often come back to is, number one, this is healthcare. And so unless you're doing some DIY work that never touches patient data, never touches anything sensitive, where the worst case scenario is an internal workflow doesn't happen, go crazy. Knock yourself out. But the vulnerabilities, the exposure, the risk in terms of special category data, healthcare, et cetera, feels very high.

18:41Jared Aron: That's one anxiety we hold. The other anxiety is that as a business owner, as a clinic leader, do you get 10x on your time? Is that where your maximum leverage exists? Are you going to go become the AI vibe coder? Is that what your organization is going to be known for? You just say, actually, there are entire teams who are doing this all day and this is all they do. We should just let them. How do you think about that for your customer conversation? It's an interesting point. So historically, I would have been very much on the side of, my dad, I used to voice this all the time. It's like, you are not a product manager.

19:12You are not a chief technology officer. You are not here to build. Your time is better spent serving your patients, using your clinical skills. You don't need to build a product that, yes, you could technically build, but then it's not going to be supported. There are literally off-the-shelf systems that you can plug in that have development teams behind them, job done. and that very much does exist and you're right to the point of kind of compliance risk all of that side of things especially if it's from a patient data perspective you are better off using the tools that are available to you especially those that have open apis that allow you to configure some of those connections all of those sorts of things but i do lean a little bit more towards nowadays there are certain things that you can probably build yourself and might be better to or just you can use more lightweight solutions you don't need to invest tens of thousands of pounds in the best crm system you don't need a microsoft dynamics or a salesforce or a site core or something like that you can use much much cleaner code much more lightweight solutions

20:14Jared Aron: basically do you find that your some of the clients you're working with right now obviously a huge part of your work is what you described earlier awareness attention activation of new patients into the front desk and I guess there are two parts the two sides of that once the patient once you've done your job the first part is what system does the patient land in so I guess this is a CRM conversation and then the second part of the part of it is from a team perspective from in-house clinic team perspective what actually happens next to that inquiry how is it managed how is it handled how's it followed yeah if you had to say we've got a bigger problem with one or the other parts probably problems with both parts but if you had to say the biggest problem the thing that is preventing a clinic from growing assuming they have the right inquiry flow the new patient flow the biggest problem is the tech is wrong or the biggest problem is that the team the in-house capability is not there to run that inquiry managing handling process which of those feel free to speak to both of them but just a gun to your head the one you solve first is tech his team is where do you go first?

21:22It's a difficult one. I don't want to sit in the fence now. I'm going to give you a pen. Because there are organisations out there that have an amazing team that have that infrastructure that they've built. There are others where it's just like, it just basically falls off a cliff. The inquiry goes in and you may never see it again. Or the worst case is where it's effectively in the hands of a medical secretary. Patients not available on Tuesday, they're just taking it to the competitor. You're literally paying for your competitor's lead in terms of the you've done your advertising you've done your job of actually getting in front of a patient getting and generating inquiry and you've shipped it off to your competitor because it's out of your hands so in that respect i think i should like fix that that's a fundamental flaw within the process that needs to be addressed and it still happens all the time but yeah i think from a technology perspective there is a lot of just there's a lot of areas now for you to just be invisible effectively or drop that potential lead to drop off so now it's are you there's a the it used to be that you could generate lots of leads and inquiries from traditional search marketing techniques where you would effectively get visibility for all the different kind of condition symptom treatment related keyword search phrases when people are doing their research that has now that whole kind of research layer is diminished and you that will all be answered by an AI because that's what we do now we're lazy all the information served up to us so the impressions or the kind of clicks you might have got for that sort of thing before have all gone and now you can easily become invisible basically by not being one of those kind of three recommendations that you'll get from an AI so the drop-off that will happen there so you've not got that visibility anymore there's drop-off that can happen at the when they've actually arrived on your site do you actually have a clear call to action to be able to book patients can they book online do when they submit an inquiry there's then the drop-off do is that what happens to that inquiry does it get picked up is there that response time we're seeing so much crazy data points in terms of how now the way in which AIs change patient behavior and it's making people behave almost more like e-commerce users more like shoppers so for example some we were looking at just reviewing some of the kind of large private hospital groups across the country and having a look at where was some of that drop-off occurring and things like cancellations gone up 178 %

23:57Jared Aron: Cancellation of first appointment? Yeah so people basically booking consultations and then the terms and condition pages have gone up through the roof in terms of click-throughs and And they're basically filling baskets like you would, maybe booking multiple consultations with different providers and then cancelling other ones, which is crazy. It's like a crazy sort of like phenomenon we're seeing off the back of this. This is really interesting. There's stuff like in terms of, so whilst traffic generally across sites has just massively dropped off, I think on average, 40 % drop off is worse than other specialties.

24:32what you're getting at the same time is huge increase in click-throughs for specific consultant names. So specific specialists, so people are basically being given the name of a specialist and then they are taking that name and then looking for it specifically. So we're seeing, for example, in over a quarter period, we saw one consultant, I think it's just a random neurologist, that had gone from never being clicked through to having something like 329 clicks, just specifically with three different name variations, Mr., Mrs., Professor, all coming from clearly being given a name from a chat TBT or like, and then coming from the same.

25:15And I think that's so interesting because effectively what's happened there is consultants, surgeons, specialists have become the products and healthcare clinics have almost become distributors of those products or those consultants again. It's completely gone full loom.

25:35Jared Aron: You're getting a big nod from those. That's a very experienced marketer on B2B side. It's really interesting. So what I'm hearing, I'm going to use my very simpleton summary of what you just said. If you are a practitioner, medical therapist, consultant, if you are patient-facing your brand, your domain credibility on an individual level, the ease with which AI and or people can find you in particular matters a lot. And then where you practice is actually the leverage and the value that you bring to that clinic because now you are the reason that people are coming to it. Yes, pretty much. And I would say what's really interesting, if I relate this back to my journey, 15 years ago or so, it was about the way in which a consultant in private practice would be successful was to have their relationship with GPs.

26:26I literally remember going to the GP wine tasting event where we'd court all the GPs, fill them up with wine and tell them about your practice and hopefully they'd refer people back onto you.

26:35Jared Aron: That was the channel. Yeah and it was just amazing and it was all about your personal brand and reputation and that's you got the consultant, the patient got the consultant letter, you did what the letter told you. Patient choice then exploded, people then had the opportunity to get in front of patients when they're specifically looking for healthcare which is that whole search journey I told you about people doing their research becoming aware of a condition looking what are the treatment options available to me online clicking on all the different links doing your research and you're basically trying to persuade that person that you are the specialist to the journey yeah and now it's almost gone full circle again where it's right back to the specific brand reputation of that consultant and that individual to in terms of the names the names that are being given so people aren't searching for private dermatologist London anymore they are being given who is the best private dermatologist and then you will go exactly and then you specifically come through for that and I think it's so into because that has massive knock on the fact particularly in London market where you've got a number of private hospital providers who are all trying to build their own brand and reputation but then consultant retention becomes even more important to them because if one of your big names walks that could be millions of pounds of revenue.

27:52Oh, gone. So I have to tell you, first of all, it's super interesting.

27:56Jared Aron: We just stopped there, that'd be super interesting. One of the things that's very interesting that we find, so again, we see a lot of data I guess later in the journey that you see a lot of data. So we see data after they've gone through their journey of discovery. We have no idea how they get to the front door but you see the data when they hit the front door. And we have one multi-site aesthetics group that we work with. There are three sites going to four sites. They are a marketing machine. Incredible brand online. Lots of organic.

28:25Jared Aron: Overwhelmingly the lead inquiry is practitioner driven. Yes. I'm looking for doctor X. I'm looking for Y. Is Y still there? I heard about doctors. Now they definitely pair that practitioner with the brand trust. So I think there is a halo in both directions. It's moving that way. You can have a great consultant if they're practicing out of a corner shop instead of Circle Health. It was really different. But I think we are seeing, particularly in that group, who I would argue are the most mature from a marketing perspective, they, I think that matches. That matches what you're describing. We had not, literally never thought about it.

29:02Jared Aron: I just said, oh, they must have very, but actually, and even the, One of the directors there said that a huge amount of the organic following comes from when the practitioners themselves are posting, are sharing. It's very interesting. Aesthetics particularly, I think you can build a huge personal brand through social media where I think it's a lot more challenging and maybe less advisable, I'd say, for other specialties. More dilution of trust. yeah absolutely and i just think that there is there seems to be more and more pressure on consultants to be mini influencers celebrities on you know creating video content being up there in social having a social presence and let's be honest that's not why people went into that industry at all you don't need to be an influencer to be a successful private practitioner you need to be good with your patients have good outcomes have good reviews all of those things are really important you can do that without having to build a kind of social media following so what we get from the agency side is this inquiry from new consultants setting out in private practice and they want to tick the box of social media can you do my social media for me and we'll say no no if you have an appetite to build a social media brand great and it could be very impactful for you but that is going to be entirely reliant on you, your drive, your ability to create content.

30:25You cannot outsource that to an agency which a lot of people do think. I think in terms of what you can do as a consultant to really build trust with patients to raise your own online presence is to make sure that you just do the basics. Do the basics right. Get a Google business page. That is one of the most overlooked things in terms of a citation and recommend where people can find you online get patient reviews get good patient reviews and have content on your website that actually speaks to what you do and what patients can expect have clear transparency around pricing all of the things that you know if a patient was coming to see you and the questions they might ask make sure that you have content that speaks to that and you have a clear call to action and ability for people to book a consultation that is what you need to be doing and spending your time considering not trying to build your own kind of celebrity personality in my opinion it's interesting the the idea that you said do the basics right which of course carries with it the what is implied is that a lot of people don't no so that's one thing to take away is that people

31:37Jared Aron: may very well fall in that category and it's interesting you remember thinking about some of the clinics that we work with there is no shortage of things to desire about their website yeah Basically, that's your digital front door. There's a lot to be, a lot can be improved. And it's also interesting to hear you say that actually, if a social media-led, content-led distribution is not authentic to the practice, then actually, that will, it will inevitably waste of money. Just think about it. I guess, to that point, there are certain specialties which are much less glamorous at some of the kind of general surgery.

32:12Who is really following a gastroenterologist? I also just think if you try to outsource that to an agency. There's no chance that they're.

32:20Jared Aron: Yeah. And what will happen is you're just going to broadcast information that's available on your website anyway. It's like, did you know that Mr. Thing is available on Tuesdays here? People are interested on social specifically behind the scenes. What is happening in their day to day practice. And that has to come from the individual. Unless you. It's almost like people are a bit deluded. You're not Stephen Bartlett. You haven't got a film crew following you around all the time. So unless you're going to create and make an effort to create that content, there's no way you're going to be able to afford an agency to follow you around and do that.

32:54It's just it's a waste of channel. And I think the other thing that bugs me about it is if you are a patient and you become aware of a health care need that you have, are you sitting around on Facebook or Instagram waiting to be targeted with an ad that says, actually, yeah, you're right. I do have fibroids. Maybe I should inquire and get an appointment on. You do something about it. It is your inherent nature to seek out health care support when you've got a need, right? You search for it. You find an individual that can help you to overcome a condition. So predominantly, your patient journey will start with someone who is actively seeking it.

33:38Social media is a great awareness channel for making people aware of something that they didn't necessarily know. And it can help to, you know, you can do... Rice cooker.

33:47Jared Aron: Yeah. You can put a bit more kind of exposure around things. It's got a place, but it's not your primary starting point as a consultant or clinic who is trying to... There are literally thousands of people searching for specific things, specific names that you can get in front of very easily through search marketing techniques. I think AI visibility is another one of those. It's, I've got a problem. I'm going to go to the quickest source of information that I trust, which is my phone in my pocket. It was Google. it's now AI, you're going to find out who is the relevant, who is the best person to support me with this very, very specific need that I've got.

34:23And you can get in front of them through effective content marketing strategy.

34:31Jared Aron: If I just, not just a way for a minute, because I think there's a lot here, which is, I think there are a lot of practices right now where things have gotten very noisy. And I think what you're saying is a lot of that noise is exactly that, it's just noise, completely distracting actually focus think very clearly about who's coming to find you why are they looking for you what do they need yep be there in the most credible way possible that is your 101 and that will quite frankly probably take you from zero to your first million pounds or dollars in turnover as a practice and then suddenly you can start thinking actually what next okay let's think about a second or third of course i don't want to completely i've been quite diminishing of social media there like joint replacement surgery maybe you are seeking out a private joint replacement and you haven't quite pulled the trigger on it and actually seeing an ad on social media just helped nudge you over the line it's there as a nurturing channel it's there to help build awareness maybe speak a slightly different message around why you are so good at what you do and reinforce but it's not your primary patient acquisition channel arguably maybe for for aesthetics and cosmetic surgery it's the only one i would say it's very visual it's very inspiring but otherwise no if you've got a particular health care need that is debilitating you're not sitting around waiting to do something about it you're going to find a provider who can actually help you with it and get it sorted so that boils down to ultimately being visible when someone when a patient is searching for something and most of this data exists as well You literally can look and see how many people are searching for X amount of things every single month.

36:14It's amazing. I'm more consolidator, maybe not full-scale private equity.

36:19Jared Aron: And I want to buy 50 clinics, 40 clinics. I'm making the number up, whatever, because I want to buy 40 clinics. And I want these clinics to maintain their own brand. I want the brand to be patient-facing. It's not going to be head office brand. It's going to be whatever the clinic was called before. and my belief as a consolidator is I can add 10 % revenue uplift by just doing a better job than now yeah marketing and building new patient flow and retention etc in the clinic and let's say that you get two minutes with them what are you going to ask them what are you going to tell them what is the what do you know that they don't know that they're going to have to spend a lot of time and money figuring out it depends on what brands healthcare brands they're buying to start with.

37:09But you're saying just a number of kind of relatively small established

37:12Jared Aron: clinics in different markets. We've called them a million pound turnover per site. Yeah. I would say that your biggest value add or value unlock from a consolidation perspective would be just that. I think it would be to consolidate the brands very quickly into something and put a effective and digital infrastructure underneath all of that that actually works and converts because I bet you any money that what you're going to inherit is 50 disparate kind of patient booking flow systems the way in which things are recorded be very different administration staff just to support all of that underneath no business intelligence that you can really glean from any of it from a digital perspective because it's all over the shop in terms of how people are booking and what people are looking for and even just the cost the cost of maintaining and optimizing 50 different sites websites I'm talking about specifically and everything that pertains to them is expensive it just is you can't you're going to cannibalize yourself very quickly from a search perspective because if you've got a clinic in Wandsworth that does I don't know like some dental treatment for example and then you have one on the other side of London doing something similar and you want to be visible for all of the related search phrases around that particular kind of specialty area or you want to advertise for them you're going to have overlap I think also from an AI perspective what AI loves specifically is really clean clear structured information how does this relate to that and when you've got all these different sites, brand names, information, consultant works here and here but not here and it just becomes a very messy picture and your ability to be sighted in that becomes diminished.

39:07And again, in many ways it's leveled the player in field but when we look at AI visibility as a whole, it generally tends to be those bigger players that will have more ability to be that sighted healthcare organisation. So I think if you just came in and consolidated the lot very quickly put it under one brand name and you could talk about the scale in which you operate, have a headless CMS system where you can pull all the content very quickly from one place, you're not cannibalizing yourself, have a very consolidated search strategy and a way to capture online booking, that would be how you unlock your, not just 10%, probably a lot more, I would say.

39:48Jared Aron: I'm conscious of time. You've given us a lot already, so thank you. I think one of the questions that I find most interesting is you've done 10 plus years, call it 10 years, in healthcare. You've seen things go from wine tasting referrals to AI native search. We live in a very different world today than we lived in 10 years ago in terms of all things healthcare and patient acquisition, patient engagement. Let's say that we sat down, and now we're 2026, let's say we sat down in 2030 yeah we had this conversation and i asked you the question what hasn't changed and then similarly what has changed so if you had to pick one thing looking out into the future what is one thing that you do not think will change despite the fact that everything is changing and then what is the one thing that you think either will change quickly or has to change or has already changed what are the sort of the rocks on either side of that scale such a good question and i want to have a really articulate answer i think the one health care goes nowhere right that's why in many ways it's a very attractive industry because we all will continue as human race to suffer from health care conditions and as we age things get worse and health care is very cyclical in that respect so the one true in all of that is that people will always have health care needs which isn't like that's a very obvious answer what will change i still think people will always seek and look out for the best healthcare providers that they possibly can how good will ai get to the point where maybe it's predicting that for us like through looking at all of our vitals and all of that i don't quite know in terms of how individual clinicians what will change for them like i think them having to have that understanding of the role of digital and how crucial and fundamental it is to their underlying business their growth that just how they actually service the core operations of their business that will always remain but that need for the kind of digital layer for your patients will always be there in probably even more so your investment in not just marketing and communications but your digital infrastructure will continue to carry pace.

42:09There's no two ways about that. And I think that's probably, again, if we looked at the top of this conversation, something that's maybe been criminally undervalued on the business side over the years, just that, oh, okay, all these different things I need to invest in. Some of this is like critical infrastructure for patients to be able to find you and be able to book. And you're able to unsaid. Yeah, it completely is, just as much as the clinical side of things.

42:36Jared Aron: so that would be my answer folks this is Ali Oliver founder chief exec at Medico Digital has been in this space for 10 years plus health care marketing communication all things helping you get found by the people who need you I'm sure that if you reached out on the back of this conversation he'd be very happy to chat of course thank you so much for joining it's really been a pleasure thank you very much for having me Jaron absolutely