Which Business Are You Building?
Jared's unfiltered take on the software trap in healthcare: why the all-in-one promise is a myth, why buy-and-smash is dead, and why the clinics that win focus on care and reliable patient coverage instead of building their own tools.
Jared Aron
“You signed up to deliver great patient care. There's no software in your mission statement.”— Jared Aron
Show notes
In this solo episode, Jared sits down with Sean for an unfiltered take on the state of clinic software and operations. His opening argument: practice management software and electronic records are the best and the worst thing to happen to healthcare. They are excellent at the jobs they were built for, but oversold on an all-in-one promise (your PMS is also your CRM, your marketing suite and your back office) that leaves owners bolting on spreadsheets and extra tools to fill the gaps. Hire software for the job it does well, he argues, the way you hire a plumber for pipes and an electrician for wiring.
From there he widens out. The buy-and-smash era of consolidation is over, and buying clinics no longer creates value on its own; what matters now is P&L transformation, real cost out and revenue in, not the theoretical minutes back that never show up in EBITDA. He unpacks two patterns he keeps meeting, the owner who always has a lot in motion and the owner who has started building their own software, and why focus, not vibe-coding your own patient platform, separates the clinics pulling away from the pack. Healthcare is a reliability, safety and redundancy market; you signed up to deliver great care, not to become a software company.
He then lays out what Coherent Engage actually is, an insurance policy that no patient falls through the cracks, CRM done for you, and how that differs from a generic HubSpot or Zoho that never talks to your practice management software. He counts through the fifteen places clinics lose patients, explains why reliable coverage across thousands of patient journeys is a technology and data problem rather than a headcount one, and closes on the thinkers shaping how Coherent builds: the focus and pace he admires, storytelling that makes an ugly logistics problem matter, and the vulnerable-world hypothesis that pushes the team to go slow to go fast on healthcare AI.
Key takeaways
- Practice management software is the best and the worst thing in healthcare. It is excellent at the jobs it was built for and oversold on everything else, so hire it for specific jobs, not as an all-in-one cure.
- Your PMS is not a CRM. Believing a single tool solves your whole practice sets you up to fail, and you end up with a Frankenstein of spreadsheets filling the gaps.
- The buy-and-smash era is over. Buying clinics no longer creates value by itself; what counts is P&L transformation, real cost out or revenue in, not minutes back that never reach EBITDA.
- There is always a lot in motion. The operators pulling away are the ones who separate signal from noise and make one or two surgical decisions where value actually gets created.
- Don't build your own software. Healthcare is a reliability, safety and redundancy market; you signed up to deliver great care, not to vibe-code a patient platform, and focus is usually the real constraint.
- Coherent Engage is an insurance policy that no patient falls through the cracks. It is CRM done for you, aligned to your clinical journey, unlike a generic CRM that never talks to your PMS.
- Retention across thousands of patient journeys is a data and technology problem, not a headcount one. There are at least fifteen distinct places clinics lose patients, and reliable coverage is what plugs the leaky bucket.
See how much revenue your clinic is leaking.
Coherent gives private clinics one patient relationship engine, recovering revenue lost at enquiry, recall and billing.