A healthcare-marketing founder on why patients no longer search for clinics but for names, why the consultant has become the product, and the unglamorous basics that actually win patients in the AI era.
“Consultants, surgeons and specialists have become the products, and healthcare clinics have almost become the distributors. It's completely gone full loop.”— Oliver Capel
Oliver Capel is founder and CEO of Medico Digital, a healthcare-specialist marketing agency he started in 2015 after running business development for consultants at Spire Healthcare. He and Jared dig into the side of healthcare that gets the least attention: not the clinical problem, but the business one, and why the sector is so slow to adopt the digital basics patients now expect.
They walk through where practices quietly lose patients: no online booking, siloed data and spreadsheets in place of a CRM, and enquiries that fall off a cliff at the front desk. Oli calls it paying for your competitor's lead, where an enquiry the clinic paid to generate is handed to a rival because nobody followed up. He is just as blunt about wasted technology spend, from six-figure Salesforce builds nobody can use to the shift towards lighter, headless, AI-assisted tools that avoid vendor lock-in.
The through-line is how AI has reshaped the way patients find care. The research layer has collapsed into a handful of AI recommendations, so a practice can simply become invisible, and patients increasingly search for a named specialist rather than a clinic. Oli argues the consultant has become the product and the clinic the distributor, which makes findability and the retention of big-name practitioners more valuable than ever. His advice for clinicians is refreshingly unglamorous: skip the influencer act, do the basics properly, and treat digital infrastructure as non-negotiable, as core as the clinical side.
Coherent gives private clinics one patient relationship engine, recovering revenue lost at enquiry, recall and billing.