Getting Patients to Return to Longevity Clinics

The hardest part of running a longevity clinic is getting patients to come back after the first visit.

I opened my talk at Next Generation Longevity in Osaka on that point and heard versions of it all week from people running far bigger businesses.

3 things I took home:

1. GLP-1 retention is decided at a few moments, how fast someone helps when side effects hit and whether the dose changes when weight loss stalls. General coaching and nutrition advice seem to matter much less.

2. Many longevity clinics are struggling because not enough patients come back, even when the medicine is good.

3. Biological age tests can give very different results for the same blood, so a number only helps if you measure the same way every time.

What I see in our own clinics is that the patients who see a doctor early are the ones who stay. The catch is that clinician time is the most expensive thing a clinic has. I think this is where AI helps most. It can follow patients between visits, spot the side effect or the stall early, and bring the clinician in at the moment it matters, so the same team can look after many more patients without the cost growing with them.

On our panel we kept coming back to the same question: who owns the patient between visits?

The people were amazing. Thank you to the organisers Deepti Agarwal, MD, DABOIM, MSCP Anant Vinjamoori, MD for putting together a room where the scientists and the people running clinics actually talk to each other. I'm already looking forward to the next one.

#Longevity #GLP1 #LongevityMedicine #HealthTech #NGL2026