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Nine years. Five hundred episodes. The tools changed completely and the distance between a patient and their care barely moved. For episode 500, Chris Boyer and Reed Smith wrote a book about why, then spent an episode arguing with it. They also explain how they built it, including the part where AI went wrong. The archive did what no human could, sorting nine years of transcripts into threads neither host could hold in their head. Then it started deciding what any of it meant, and the drafts got smoother and less true at the same time. Chris describes it as walking toward the edge of a cliff, where the view keeps improving right up until it doesn't. The rest of the episode is self-scoring. Some calls held up. A guest argued in 2018 that the value of telemedicine sat in asynchronous messaging rather than the video visit, five years before the industry agreed. Another said your website was no longer your website, and has been repeating it almost yearly since. Being right early turned out not to change anything, which is a harder finding than being wrong. And they were wrong in places they name out loud, including a tracking pixel they treated as an optimization question years before it became one of the largest privacy failures in healthcare marketing. In this episode: Where AI genuinely accelerated nine years of archive work, and the exact point it stopped being useful Why the cliff metaphor describes an organizational risk and not just a writing problem Three calls the show got right early, and why early was not the same as useful The consumerism frame that described a market most of the country does not live in What it means that the front door moved onto property health systems do not own The access admission, said plainly, and what it costs to say it If the right people heard the argument and agreed with it and nothing moved, then knowing was never the thing standing in the way. Healthcare's Long Walk Toward the Patient is free. Ten chapters, 26 guests. Mentions from the Show: Healthcare's Long Walk Toward the Patient, the free eBook, Touch Point Media, August 2026: https://www.touchpointpodcastbook.com/?utm_source=touchpoint&utm_medium=shownotes&utm_campaign=tp500 TP55, "Pixels and Vertical Videos: Is Facebook Forcing Us to Advertise Correctly?" February 2018: https://touchpoint.health/podcast/tp55-pixels-vertical-videos-facebook-forcing-us-advertise-correctly/  TP73, "Deep Learning in Healthcare" with Abhi Sharma, June 2018: https://touchpoint.health/podcast/tp73-deep-learning-in-healthcare/  TP80, "A Telemedicine Tell-All" with Dr. Justin Smith, August 2018: https://touchpoint.health/podcast/tp80-a-telemedicine-tell-all/  TP115, "Your Website Isn't Your Website Anymore" with Carrie Liken, April 2019: https://touchpoint.health/podcast/tp115-your-website-isnt-your-website-anymore/  TP342, "When Does 'Patient Access' Actually Begin?": https://touchpoint.health/podcast/tp342-when-does-patient-access-actually-begin/  TP483, on hospital market competition, drawing on Health Care Cost Institute data: https://touchpoint.health/podcast/tp483-the-market-that-competition-forgot/  TP488, on marketing and patient activation, drawing on the Forum for Healthcare Strategists and Digital Health Strategies CMO survey: https://touchpoint.health/podcast/tp488-what-if-marketing-owned-patient-activation/  TP493, "Ghost Networks and the Reflex to Automate" with Chris Hemphill and Heather Nairn: https://touchpoint.health/podcast/tp493-ghost-networks-and-the-reflex-to-automate/  Health Care Cost Institute, Health Cost Landscape, April 2026: https://healthcostinstitute.org/all-hcci-reports/what-is-the-health-cost-landscape/ AJMC on the HCCI Healthy Marketplace Index: https://www.ajmc.com/view/nearly-75-of-us-hospital-markets-highly-concentrated-hcci-report-shows Reed Smith on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/reedtsmith/ Chris Boyer on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chrisboyer/ Chris Boyer website: http://www.christopherboyer.com/ Chris Boyer on BlueSky: https://bsky.app/profile/chrisboyer.bsky.social Reed Smith on BlueSky: https://bsky.app/profile/reedsmith.bsky.social Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

HCAHPS produces 11 publicly reported measures of patient experience. Not one of them asks about a bill. The financial/billing experience sits outside most ways this industry uses to define patient experience. And it arrives with your logo on it. Chris Boyer and Reed Smith discuss what that gap costs. The financial experience decides whether the next clinical experience happens at all. In most health systems, brand standards govern the digital experience, website, campaigns, and the call center. But the statement, the denial letter and the financial assistance page are managed separately. They also discuss the requirements to reach the people in the community most likely to need financial help but describe how these efforts read like a marketing campaign, but marketing never got this memo.  Then Cassandra Skinner from Xsolis makes the case for collecting correctly rather than collecting less, arguing that compassion and accountability were never opposites. She also describes how patient advocacy acts as quiet work that lives in questioning one authorization or catching one coordination of benefits error. On automation she draws the line at can versus should. And she lands somewhere worth sitting with, that patients do not lose trust because a machine was involved, they lose trust when nobody will own the decision. Why the instrument that defines patient experience has no question about cost, and what that does to budgets and attention What marketing gave up when the billing statement became somebody else's document The financial assistance requirements already written into federal law, and why satisfying them has not made patients aware Why a decade of mandated price disclosure produced more published data and not more patient understanding What revenue cycle sees about a patient that marketing never does Where accountability has to sit when part of the decision is automated If your health system's financial assistance page would fail the standard you apply to any campaign you would sign your name to, you just found work that has been yours the whole time. Mentions from the Show: IRS, Financial Assistance Policy and Emergency Medical Care Policy, Section 501(r)(4): https://www.irs.gov/charities-non-profits/financial-assistance-policy-and-emergency-medical-care-policy-section-501r4 AHRQ, CAHPS Adult Hospital Survey (11 measures effective January 1, 2025): https://www.ahrq.gov/cahps/surveys-guidance/hospital/about/adult_hp_survey.html CMS, HCAHPS Patients' Perspectives of Care Survey (administered 48 hours to six weeks after discharge): https://www.cms.gov/medicare/quality/initiatives/hospital-quality-initiative/hcahps-patients-perspectives-care-survey KFF, Americans' Challenges with Health Care Costs, updated April 2026 (about half of adults could not pay an unexpected $500 medical bill): https://www.kff.org/health-costs/americans-challenges-with-health-care-costs/ KFF Health Care Debt Survey (41% with health care debt, 51% of those with debt skipped recommended care): https://www.kff.org/health-costs/kff-health-care-debt-survey/ KFF, Hospital Charity Care, How It Works and Why It Matters: https://www.kff.org/health-costs/issue-brief/hospital-charity-care-how-it-works-and-why-it-matters/ Dollar For, Fixing Hospital Financial Assistance Programs (52% never informed, 65% unaware it existed). Patient advocacy nonprofit, labeled as such on air: https://dollarfor.org/fixing-hospital-finaid/ AHA, Hospital Price Transparency, Current Landscape and a Better Path Forward, June 5 2026: https://www.aha.org/fact-sheets/2026-06-05-fact-sheet-hospital-price-transparency-current-landscape-and-better-path-forward AHA, Improving the Patient Billing Experience issue brief, October 2021: https://www.aha.org/system/files/media/file/2021/10/Improving-Patient-Billing-Experience_IB_Final_10-22-21.pdf CMS, CY 2026 OPPS and ASC Final Rule, Hospital Price Transparency Policy Changes: https://www.cms.gov/newsroom/fact-sheets/cy-2026-opps-ambulatory-surgical-center-final-rule-hospital-price-transparency-policy-changes HFMA, CMS's latest transparency rule aims to make price estimates more exact, November 2025 (named executive on the machine-readable file): https://www.hfma.org/price-transparency/cmss-latest-transparency-rule-aims-to-make-price-estimates-more-exact/ Ways and Means Committee, H.R. 9504 Tax Exempt Hospital Transparency Act reporting elements, July 2026: https://waysandmeans.house.gov/2026/07/20/what-they-are-saying-ways-and-means-committee-bringing-transparency-to-americas-nonprofit-hospital-sector/ Cassandra Skinner on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/cskinner-health/  XSOLIS website: https://www.xsolis.com/  Reed Smith on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/reedtsmith/ Chris Boyer on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chrisboyer/ Chris Boyer website: http://www.christopherboyer.com/ Chris Boyer on BlueSky: https://bsky.app/profile/chrisboyer.bsky.social Learn more about your ad choices. 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Almost no modern health consumer can evaluate whether their surgery was done well, whether their imaging was read correctly or whether a different drug would have worked better. Economists have a name for that kind of purchase, a credence good, and healthcare is the textbook case. So patients judge what they can see. The website, the search results and whether they could get an appointment. Chris Boyer and Reed Smith open with why that judgment is rational rather than unfair. Stanford's web credibility research asked more than 2,500 people what made a site believable and found design look led every other factor at 46.1% of comments, well ahead of accuracy of information at 14.3%. That research is from 2003 and the behavior has not moved. Meanwhile the audited quality data has been free and one search away for years, and it loses to the impression. Press Ganey's 2025 consumer work puts brand reputation at 86% of influence on choice. The uncomfortable conclusion is that the web experience is the first quality claim an organization makes, and it gets defended in budget meetings on cost per acquisition. The second segment follows the person for whom this goes badly. More than 30% of US adults lacked a usual source of care in 2022, the highest level in a decade, during a stretch of historically high insurance coverage. The federal government counts this. In the 2022 National Health Interview Survey, 21.7% of adults delayed or skipped care for a nonfinancial reason, and 10.6% because no appointment was available when they needed one. Nothing inside a health system counts any of it, because conversion, satisfaction scores and market share all describe people who finished something. Chris and Reed make the case that an abandoned search is the earliest visible moment of someone falling out of care, and that it sits in a marketing tool nobody has assigned an owner. Then Sondra Brown of MDRG and Chris Pace of SearchStax bring the research they ran on the digital front door. They walk through the collapse in whether people believe hospitals put care ahead of profits, why sites built against the org chart cannot serve a patient journey, and a verbatim from the qualitative work about what a dated website tells a patient about the medicine behind it. Chris takes on the argument that the website is dead in an AI-first world and explains why first-party content became more load-bearing rather than less. And they land on the number this whole episode circles, what happens to people who cannot find a new primary care doctor online. A quarter of them stop looking altogether. Mentions from the Show: SearchStax and MDRG, The State of Enterprise Site Search, 2026.https://www.searchstax.com/white-papers/the-state-of-enterprise-site-search/  Milbank Memorial Fund and The Physicians Foundation with the Robert Graham Center, The Health of US Primary Care: 2025 Scorecard:  https://www.milbank.org/publications/the-health-of-us-primary-care-2025-scorecard-report-the-cost-of-neglect/ NCHS, Sociodemographic Differences in Nonfinancial Access Barriers to Health Care Among Adults: United States, 2022, National Health Statistics Reports no. 207, August 2024 (21.7% reporting at least one nonfinancial barrier, 10.6% unable to find an available appointment): https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nhsr/nhsr207.pdf Fogg BJ, Soohoo C, Danielson D, Marable L, Stanford J, Tauber E, How Do Users Evaluate the Credibility of Web Sites? Stanford Persuasive Technology Lab, DUX 2003 (design look 46.1% of credibility comments, 41.8% for health sites): https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/997078.997097 AMN Healthcare, 2025 Survey of Physician Appointment Wait Times (31-day average for a new patient appointment, up 19% since 2022). AMN is a physician staffing firm, disclosed on air: https://www.amnhealthcare.com/siteassets/amn-insights/physician/ps-2025-physician-appt-wait-times---wp-v6.pdf Press Ganey, Healthcare Consumer Experience 2025 (86% citing brand reputation, 49% willing to wait up to three weeks for a primary care appointment). Industry-published, disclosed on air: https://www.pressganey.com/news/press-ganey-report-reveals-the-trust-factors-reshaping-how-consumers-make-healthcare-decisions/ Sondra Brown on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sondra-brown-360a999/ Chris Pace on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chrispaceaz/ Chris Pace's Substack: https://chriscellaneous.substack.com/ . Reed Smith on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/reedtsmith/ Chris Boyer on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chrisboyer/ Chris Boyer website: http://www.christopherboyer.com/ Chris Boyer on BlueSky: https://bsky.app/profile/chrisboyer.bsky.social Reed Smith on BlueSky: https://bsky.app/profile/reedsmith.bsky.social Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

For thirty years, healthcare has met every new technology with the same four words, we've seen this before. Most of the time the doubt loses. The internet was called a fad, and by 2009 a majority of US adults were looking up health information online, up from a quarter in 2000. So the reflex is earned. This episode asks the harder question, whether being right about the internet tells you anything at all about AI. Chris Boyer and Reed Smith open with why the reflex is so strong. The 1999 objections to the web read almost word for word like the 2024 objections to AI. Patients won't trust it. It makes mistakes. It can't replace the clinician. Pew found 60% of US adults uncomfortable with a provider relying on AI for their own care, which rhymes with the discomfort that greeted the web. There is even a formal model for the pattern, the Gartner Hype Cycle, though its own critics point out the curve has no data behind it. In the second segment they find where the analogy breaks. The web reached a majority of adults over roughly a decade. ChatGPT reached 100 million users in about two months, the fastest ramp UBS had seen in twenty years. The web moved information you could still judge by its source. A large language model makes the answer in the moment, with no source to check, in the same confident tone whether it's right or wrong. Chris and Reed hand you one question to run in a meeting, does the thing that made the old case turn out fine actually show up here, and one way to sort your AI uses by how much a wrong answer costs. Then the conversation turns to two people who have hosted the room where healthcare argues about this since 1996. Kathy Divis and Mike Schneider of Greystone.Net mark the 30th anniversary of HCIC. They trace digital from a small side function to something so central that a keynote once argued digital marketing was dead, meaning it had stopped needing its own name. Mike makes the point plainly, the technology changes and the questions stay the same, from the internet to CRM to AI. And they share what surfaced across this year's conference proposals, a return to trust and authority as the theme running through the whole organization. In this episode, Chris, Reed and the guests cover: Why we've seen this before is both earned pattern recognition and a way to stop thinking Where the AI story tracks the internet and where it breaks, on speed and on the difference between moving information and making it The one question that separates a real analogy from a comforting one How 30 years of HCIC read the same skepticism across the internet, CRM and AI What it means when a technology stops needing its own name, and why invisible was the goal for the web and the risk for AI Why trust and authority came back as the theme in this year's proposals If someone in your next meeting says we've seen this before, this episode is about the follow-up question that tells you whether they just said something wise or talked the room out of thinking. touchpoint.health Mentions from the Show: Pew Research Center, The Social Life of Health Information, 2009 (25% of adults online for health info in 2000, 61% by 2009): https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2009/06/11/the-social-life-of-health-information/ Pew Research Center, 60% of Americans Would Be Uncomfortable With a Provider Relying on AI in Their Own Health Care, 2023: https://www.pewresearch.org/science/2023/02/22/60-of-americans-would-be-uncomfortable-with-provider-relying-on-ai-in-their-own-health-care/ Gartner, Hype Cycle Research Methodology: https://www.gartner.com/en/research/methodologies/gartner-hype-cycle Reuters, ChatGPT sets record for fastest-growing user base, 2023 (100M users in about two months): https://finance.yahoo.com/news/1-chatgpt-sets-record-fastest-051929384.html BMJ Open, 2026 chatbot health-information audit (nearly half of answers problematic). CONFIRM primary link and figures before publish. Medical Hallucination in Foundation Models, medRxiv, 2025 (overconfidence and poor calibration): https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.02.28.25323115v1.full HCIC (Healthcare Interactive Conference), 30th anniversary, produced by Greystone: https://www.hcic.net/ Live  Kathy Divis, president, Greystone. https://www.linkedin.com/in/kathyldivis/   Mike Schneider, Greystone. https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelschneider-greystone/  Reed Smith on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/reedtsmith/ Chris Boyer on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chrisboyer/ Chris Boyer website: http://www.christopherboyer.com/ Chris Boyer on BlueSky: https://bsky.app/profile/chrisboyer.bsky.social Reed Smith on BlueSky: https://bsky.app/profile/reedsmith.bsky.social Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Ninety-eight percent of patients say feedback is easy to give. Half of them ever see anything come of it. Chris and Reed spend this episode on the half that goes quiet. The prompt came from the Alchemer 2026 Healthcare Experience Report, a vendor study Reed flagged in the TPS report. Its numbers do the setup work. Patients can speak, and about half watch nothing come back. The most useful finding is the one about the people who never responded at all. Roughly half of them said nobody asked. Only about ten percent said they figured it would not matter. The industry has been building campaigns to re-engage patients it never invited. Chris and Reed then push past the vendor data into the instrument the whole industry runs on. HCAHPS launched in 2006 as a standardized public accountability measure, and it does that job. It is also a payment mechanism. A quarter of a hospital's value-based purchasing score comes from it, and CMS withholds two percent of base operating DRG payments into the pool it feeds. When the score moves money, the organization manages the score. Saving one upset patient earns nothing on that scoreboard. Reed draws the line between a rating and a review, then finds the hole underneath both. A system can act on feedback, fix the process for the next patient, and the person who raised it never learns a thing. Healthcare is not built to be visible about its own quality improvement. He also names the unglamorous version of the problem, the intake screen where somebody keys in a fake phone number to advance to the next field, which quietly guarantees nobody can ever reach that patient again. In this episode, Chris and Reed cover: Why the silence after a bad experience is an invitation problem, not an apathy problem The 22-point gap between patients who feel acknowledged and patients who see action How a survey tied to reimbursement ends up managing a score instead of a relationship What Schwab and Apple settled fifteen years ago that healthcare still argues about Why a real-time feedback tool on a short-staffed unit can make things worse Feedback as an early safety signal, and why marketing usually owns the platform it arrives on Acknowledgment is not action. If the only thing that ever comes back to a patient is thanks for your feedback, you closed the ticket and left the loop open. Mentions from the Show: Alchemer, 2026 Healthcare Experience Report (vendor study, disclosed on air): https://www.alchemer.com/resources/e-guide/2026-healthcare-experience-report/ Penn LDI, Surveys of Hospital Patients Evolve to Use Email, Phone and Mail, 2025 (HCAHPS response rates, survey timing): https://ldi.upenn.edu/our-work/research-updates/surveys-of-hospital-patients-evolve-to-use-email-phone-and-mail-and-even-narratives/ Susan Edgman-Levitan, AHRQ CAHPS principal investigator, on response bias, 2025: https://www.patientguidesolutions.com/beyond-the-new-hcahps CMS Hospital Value-Based Purchasing, HCAHPS weighting and the 2% DRG withhold: https://www.cms.gov/medicare/quality/value-based-programs/hospital-value-based-purchasing Becker's Hospital Review, A New HCAHPS Survey for a New Year (Rick Evans, NewYork-Presbyterian e-survey pilot), 2024: https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/patient-experience/a-new-hcahps-survey-for-a-new-year/ The Beryl Institute, Closing the Loop: Using Real-Time Feedback to Improve Patient Experience (Providence Holy Cross): https://theberylinstitute.org/product/closing-the-loop-using-real-time-feedback-to-improve-patient-experience/ Bain & Company, Closing the Loop (Net Promoter System, Charles Schwab and Apple, inner and outer loop): https://www.bain.com/insights/closing-the-loop/ Press Ganey, patient safety and likelihood to recommend (measurement vendor): https://www.pressganey.com/resources/blog/patient-experience-2025-new-trends/ CMS Patient Safety Structural Measures, 2025 (patient and family involvement as one of five components): CONFIRM URL before publish Baldrige Performance Excellence Program, voice of the customer criteria: https://www.nist.gov/baldrige TP68, Yelp or HCAHPS: Which is Better to Measure Patient Experience? (May 2018): https://touchpoint.health/podcast/tp68-yelp-or-hcahps-which-is-better-to-measure-patient-experience/ Unbound Snacks, Chris's recommendation (flavored walnuts): https://www.unboundsnacks.com/ Reed Smith on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/reedtsmith/ Chris Boyer on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chrisboyer/ Chris Boyer website: http://www.christopherboyer.com/ Chris Boyer on BlueSky: https://bsky.app/profile/chrisboyer.bsky.social Reed Smith on BlueSky: https://bsky.app/profile/reedsmith.bsky.social Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Reed Smith and Chris Boyer walk through why systems pursue scale, what the deal model captures well and the parts it tends to leave out, the patient experience, brand and digital continuity that rarely get their own line in the financial plan. McKinsey's early-2026 read has healthcare M&A shifting from buying new markets toward integrating what systems already own, with roughly 70 to 80% of provider deals now like-for-like consolidation, so the integration work is getting more attention than it used to. Then they are joined by their guest expert, Christine Albert. She has led marketing and experience through multiple integrations as a chief marketing and experience officer, and she calls this stretch the messy middle. She is practical about it. How to get marketing and digital into the deal conversation early. Why brand architecture is more than a logo lockup. Why the internal team should be the first audience you communicate with. And what the leaders who integrate well tend to do differently, starting sooner and treating the acquired team as an asset. In this episode, Chris, Reed and Christine cover: What a merger's financial model captures and what the integration work adds Where AI helps in an integration and where the work still runs on people How marketing, digital and experience earn a seat in the deal conversation early Why brand and internal communication shape how an integration lands What leaders who integrate well do differently from the first planning meeting If your system is in a deal, or headed toward one, this is a practical look at the work that shapes how it feels to patients and staff on the other side. touchpoint.health Mentions from the Show: Kaufman Hall, M&A Quarterly Activity Report Q1 2026 (22 transactions, strongest Q1 since 2020; Sutter and Allina 39-hospital, $26B): https://www.kaufmanhall.com/insights/research-report/ma-quarterly-activity-report-q1-2026 Kaufman Hall, 2025 Hospital and Health System M&A in Review (46 transactions, the quieter 2025 baseline): https://www.kaufmanhall.com/insights/research-report/hospital-and-health-system-2025-ma-review-uncertainty-transitions-continue McKinsey, US healthcare M&A: value through diversification, Feb 2026 (shift toward integration; 70 to 80% like-for-like): https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/m-and-a/our-insights/us-healthcare-companies-continue-to-create-value-through-diversification McKinsey, Healthcare private equity outlook, HPE Miami 2026 (operational execution ranked over financial engineering): https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/healthcare/our-insights/healthcare-blog/healthcare-private-equity-outlook-takeaways-from-hpe-miami-2026 PwC 2026 healthcare M&A outlook, via Fierce Healthcare, Dec 2025 (AI as a driver of margin and growth): https://www.fiercehealthcare.com/finance/key-trends-will-shape-healthcare-ma-activity-2026-pwc Christine Albert on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/christineyalbert/  Reed Smith on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/reedtsmith/ Chris Boyer on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chrisboyer/ Chris Boyer website: http://www.christopherboyer.com/ Chris Boyer on BlueSky: https://bsky.app/profile/chrisboyer.bsky.social Reed Smith on BlueSky: https://bsky.app/profile/reedsmith.bsky.social Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This week's Touch Point is an encore. We are replaying TP470, "When AI Becomes the First Stop for Care." It aired in January, the same week OpenAI launched ChatGPT Health. Chris and Reed sat down with Brandon Scott of TenAdams and made a plain argument. For a growing number of patients, the health journey now starts inside an AI chat, before any health system enters the picture. Five months later the premise is no longer up for debate. By OpenAI's count, more than 230 million people ask health questions on ChatGPT every week, and roughly 40 million do it daily. The patient who shows up already holding an AI explanation of their lab results is now routine. What the original episode left open is the reason to replay it. TP470 asked how health systems would respond. The most visible answer so far is that they bought from the same company. OpenAI for Healthcare rolled out inside AdventHealth, Cedars-Sinai, HCA, Boston Children's, Stanford and other systems within a day of the consumer launch. In April, OpenAI put a free tool directly on clinicians' desks. The vendor that became the patient's first stop is now also the clinician's workspace and the enterprise platform. The front door, the exam room and the back office increasingly run through one synthesis layer. In this encore, Chris and Reed cover: Why AI became the first stop for care before most health systems had a strategy for it What ChatGPT Health actually does, and the line between "support" and "diagnosis" that OpenAI keeps drawing Where AI fills the gaps left by short appointments, fragmented records and limited access Why walled garden thinking is out of step with how patients now manage their health What changes when the tool patients trust and the tool clinicians use come from the same vendor If your digital strategy still treats the website as the first interaction, this episode was early to the problem and the problem only got bigger. Mentions from the Show: Original episode: TP470, When AI Becomes the First Stop for Care. https://touchpoint.health/podcast/tp470-when-ai-becomes-the-first-stop-for-care/ OpenAI, Introducing ChatGPT Health (Jan 7, 2026): https://openai.com/index/introducing-chatgpt-health/ OpenAI, Introducing OpenAI for Healthcare (Jan 8, 2026): https://openai.com/index/openai-for-healthcare/ Fierce Healthcare, OpenAI launches ChatGPT for Clinicians (Apr 30, 2026): https://www.fiercehealthcare.com/ai-and-machine-learning/openai-launches-chatgpt-clinicians-free-ai-tool-physicians-nps-and Advisory Board, Ty Aderhold on ChatGPT Health: https://www.advisory.com/daily-briefing/2026/01/12/chatgpt-health-ab-oi-ec TP476, Good Enough for People Is Not Good Enough for Machines: https://touchpoint.health/podcast/tp476-good-enough-for-people-is-not-good-enough-for-machines/ Brandon Scott on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brandontascott/ TenAdams: http://tenadams.com Reed Smith on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/reedtsmith/ Chris Boyer on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chrisboyer/ Chris Boyer website: http://www.christopherboyer.com/ Chris Boyer on BlueSky: https://bsky.app/profile/chrisboyer.bsky.social Reed Smith on BlueSky: https://bsky.app/profile/reedsmith.bsky.social Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Chris Boyer and Reed Smith bring in two people who worked the problem from the inside. Chris Hemphill of Modular Feedback, who builds AI for a living, and Heather Nairn, a healthcare economist who reads this as an access problem first. The reflex across the industry is to point AI at the mess. Standardize the data, set some agents loose, let the model sort it out. Hemphill and Nairn tested that reflex against a plain deterministic workflow on exactly this job. The workflow won on accuracy, on speed and on cost. Their point is not that AI is useless here. It is that the most useful skill in this work is knowing when not to reach for it. The deeper problem is structural. Provider data is a commodity. Every payer and every health system chases the same handful of fields, guards its copy as proprietary, and rebuilds the same record in parallel. Every cycle spent on that is a cycle not spent on the access work that moves outcomes. Transportation, care coordination, the patient in crisis who just needs a number that connects. Mentions from the Show: U.S. Senate Finance Committee, Ghost Network Secret Shopper Study, May 2023: https://www.finance.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/050323%20Ghost%20Network%20Hearing%20-%20Secret%20Shopper%20Study%20Report.pdf HHS Office of Inspector General, behavioral health network issue brief, October 2025 (72% of listed clinicians non-participating) New York Attorney General, "Inaccurate and Inadequate: Health Plans' Mental Health Provider Directories" (EmblemHealth investigation) American Psychiatric Association class-action complaint against EmblemHealth, January 2026: https://psychiatryonline.org/doi/full/10.1176/appi.pn.2026.03.3.15 CMS Final Rule CMS-4208-F2, finalized September 2025 (MA directory data to Medicare Plan Finder by plan year 2027; 85% accuracy threshold) Ideon, CMS Provider Directory Requirements compliance guide, March 2026 (48.74% of MA provider locations carry at least one inaccuracy): https://ideonapi.com/resources/blog/cms-provider-directory-requirements-a-complete-compliance-guide-for-2026-2027/ JAMA, AI-assisted directory inconsistency study, University of Colorado researchers (81% of physicians show inconsistencies), via Healthcare Dive: https://www.healthcaredive.com/news/inconsistent-physician-directories-no-surprises-act/645307/ Modular Feedback (Chris Hemphill), deployment write-up: https://modularfeedback.com/blog Chris Hemphill on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chrishemphill/ CONFIRM handle Heather Nairn on LinkedIn: CONFIRM URL Reed Smith on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/reedtsmith/ Chris Boyer on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chrisboyer/ Chris Boyer website: http://www.christopherboyer.com/ Chris Boyer on BlueSky: https://bsky.app/profile/chrisboyer.bsky.social Reed Smith on BlueSky: https://bsky.app/profile/reedsmith.bsky.social Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We have spent years pulling friction out of healthcare. That work is right and it should keep going. This week Reed Smith and Chris Boyer come at it from the other side and ask what the friction that remains is trying to tell us. The frame comes from Jon Acuff, who argues that the size of the inconvenience a person will tolerate points to what they actually value. Aim that at patients and the data gets more honest than any survey. A patient who drives forty minutes past three closer hospitals for a specific surgeon is showing you a commitment you could never manufacture. A patient who hits a wall of hold music and no-shows rather than fight through it is showing you something too. The first is loyalty. The second is a system breaking in a way the industry keeps logging as patient disengagement. One thing complicates the read. Tolerance only counts as a signal when the patient had a choice. The drive past closer options can be a referral lock, a narrow network, a single in-network plan or rural geography with no second door. Read that patient as loyal and you let an access failure pass as a win. Then Reed and Chris flip the lens onto the organization. The initiatives that survive a budget cycle or a leadership change tend to be the ones where someone absorbed real organizational pain on purpose. Most good ideas in healthcare don't fail because they were wrong. They stall because the inconvenience of doing them outran the conviction behind them. In this episode, Chris and Reed cover: Why a patient's tolerance for friction reads more honestly than a satisfaction score The line between the friction tax you impose and the friction patients accept on purpose When loyalty is really a captured patient with no alternative The four inconveniences that quietly kill good initiatives inside a health system How to score an initiative's inconvenience against the commitment behind it If purpose shows up in what you're willing to put up with, your roadmap already knows which bets you believe in. Mentions from the Show: Accenture, patient loyalty and provider selection research (access as a top factor when choosing a provider): https://www.accenture.com/us-en/insightsnew/health/difference-between-loyalty-leaving TP483, The Market That Competition Forgot: https://touchpoint.health/podcast/ CONFIRM slug TP485, Digital Equity Is Health Equity: https://touchpoint.health/podcast/ CONFIRM slug Reed Smith on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/reedtsmith/ Chris Boyer on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chrisboyer/ Chris Boyer website: http://www.christopherboyer.com/ Chris Boyer on BlueSky: https://bsky.app/profile/chrisboyer.bsky.social Reed Smith on BlueSky: https://bsky.app/profile/reedsmith.bsky.social Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Chris Boyer and Reed Smith run a forensic walk through five dated, citable moments where the future of healthcare consumerism was sitting in published research before the industry moved. The Pew health-seeker data in 2000. ePatient Dave's "Gimme My Damn Data" keynote in 2009, which took twelve years to reach the Information Blocking Rule. Mobile crossing into everyday health behavior by 2012. Apple, Amazon and Haven all declaring healthcare a priority inside twelve months in 2018 and 2019. Peer-reviewed AI matching dermatologists in 2017, three years before most people had heard of ChatGPT. The signals were never really about the technology. Each one was a permission a consumer gave themselves. Permission to research without asking. Permission to demand their data. Permission to expect everywhere and anytime. Permission to compare a hospital to Apple. Permission to skip the front door. Name the permission and you have found the signal. Five artifacts, each with a date and a source, and the same defensive industry response to all of them A six-marker test that tells you whether you are inside a signal while it is still a signal, not after Why the permission shift is the marker most teams miss, and the permission patients are taking right now The scoreboard for today: agentic AI as the new front door, the death of click-through, the restructuring of primary care, and voice The one current signal that breaks the pattern, and why ambient documentation moved fast when nothing else did The honest finding is uncomfortable. Three of today's four signals score 5 or 6 out of 6 on the same markers that flagged every past miss. The fourth, voice, scores about 3, and it shows what breaks the pattern. Ambient documentation moved quickly because it helps clinicians and patients in the same motion, so the internal politics line up instead of fighting. If you can name the permission your patients are taking right now, you have found the signal. The only question left is whether you act inside the window or wait for the deadline. Mentions from the Show: Pew Research Center, The Online Health Care Revolution, Rainie and Fox, November 2000: https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2000/11/26/the-online-health-care-revolution/ Pew Research Center, Health Online 2013, Fox and Duggan, January 2013: https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2013/01/15/health-online-2013-2/ deBronkart and Eysenbach, Gimme My Damn Data (and Let Patients Help!): The #GimmeMyDamnData Manifesto, JMIR, November 2019: https://www.jmir.org/2019/11/e17045/ Esteva et al., Dermatologist-level classification of skin cancer with deep neural networks, Nature, January 2017: https://www.nature.com/articles/nature21056 Tom Ferguson and the e-Patient Scholars Working Group, e-Patients: How They Can Help Us Heal Healthcare, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, 2007: https://participatorymedicine.org/e-Patient_White_Paper_with_Afterword.pdf Tim Cook on CNBC's Mad Money, full transcript, January 8 2019: https://www.cnbc.com/2019/01/08/apple-ceo-tim-cook-interview-cnbc-jim-cramer-transcript.html Kyndryl, Healthcare Readiness Report, March 2026 (76% report more AI pilots than they can scale): https://www.kyndryl.com/in/en/about-us/news/2026/03/healthcare-readiness-report-findings Dave deBronkart, Meet e-Patient Dave, TED: https://www.ted.com/talks/dave_debronkart_meet_e_patient_dave Eric Topol, Deep Medicine, Basic Books, 2019: https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/eric-topol/deep-medicine/9781541644649/ Eric Topol, The Patient Will See You Now, Basic Books, 2015 Clayton Christensen, Jerome Grossman, Jason Hwang, The Innovator's Prescription, McGraw-Hill, 2009 Dave deBronkart, Let Patients Help!, 2013 Society for Participatory Medicine: https://participatorymedicine.org/ TP483, The Market That Competition Forgot: https://touchpoint.health/podcast/tp483-the-market-that-competition-forgot/ TP478, The Journey Nobody Told Operations About: https://touchpoint.health/podcast/tp478-the-journey-nobody-told-operations-about/ TP457, The Patient Maze: Smarter Tools, Same Old Problems: https://touchpoint.health/podcast/tp457-the-patient-maze-smarter-tools-same-old-problems/ Reed Smith on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/reedtsmith/ Chris Boyer on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chrisboyer/ Chris Boyer website: http://www.christopherboyer.com/ Chris Boyer on BlueSky: https://bsky.app/profile/chrisboyer.bsky.social Reed Smith on BlueSky: https://bsky.app/profile/reedsmith.bsky.social Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Chris Boyer and Reed Smith walk through why the gap is structural rather than a marketing problem, then close with David Middendorf at Monigle on what Volume 9 actually says about where consumers are right now. Why engagement in health and engagement with healthcare have decoupled, and what the avoidance number among the most engaged segment actually means The structural reasons the operating model can't win this space, from P&L logic to service-line measurement to where wellness programs sit on the org chart The DTC and subscription brands that took categories that used to be referrals inside a health system, and built continuous relationships around them Why a majority of consumers now believe a technology company is more likely to revolutionize healthcare than a traditional system or provider Trust, local knowledge, the provider relationship, the clinical record, and what it would take to actually deploy those as competitive advantages David Middendorf on the "window not a wave" framing, AI as connective tissue for what Monigle calls a Living System of Experiences, and the three keys to the future: listening, personalization, wellness David Middendorf leads the Humanizing Brand Experience research at Monigle. Volume 9 is the ninth annual installment of the firm's flagship study of healthcare consumer behavior. He joins the show to walk through what the new data is saying and what health system brand and experience leaders should do about it. If your strategy deck still treats the space between sick visits as future state, the disruption has already happened and you missed it. Mentions from the Show: Monigle, Humanizing Brand Experience Vol. 9: Healthcare Edition, 2026: https://www.monigle.com/insights/humanizing-brand-experience-volume-9-healthcare-edition David Middendorf on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dave-middendorf-195b924/ Monigle: https://www.monigle.com/ Global Wellness Institute, Global Wellness Economy Monitor 2025, November 2025: https://globalwellnessinstitute.org/industry-research/2025-global-wellness-economy-monitor/ Global Wellness Institute, US Wellness Economy Reaches $2 Trillion, March 2025: https://globalwellnessinstitute.org/press-room/press-releases/gow-us-econ-valued-at-2trillion/ Kaufman Hall, National Hospital Flash Report, December 2025 data, February 2026: https://www.kaufmanhall.com/insights/research-report/national-hospital-flash-report-december-2025-data HealthLeaders, Hospital Margins Stabilize as 'New Normal' Takes Hold, February 2026: https://www.healthleadersmedia.com/ceo/hospital-margins-stabilize-new-normal-takes-hold Hims & Hers Health, Q4 and Full Year 2025 Financial Results, February 2026: https://investors.hims.com/news/news-details/2026/Hims--Hers-Health-Inc--Reports-Fourth-Quarter-and-Full-Year-2025-Financial-Results/default.aspx TP481, Building the Schema App With Martha Van Berkel: https://touchpoint.health/podcast/tp481-building-the-schema-app-with-martha-van-berkel/ TP488, A Marketing-Led Approach to Patient Reactivation: https://touchpoint.health/podcast/tp488-a-marketing-led-approach-to-patient-reactivation/ Reed Smith on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/reedtsmith/ Chris Boyer on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chrisboyer/ Chris Boyer website: http://www.christopherboyer.com/ Chris Boyer on BlueSky: https://bsky.app/profile/chrisboyer.bsky.social Reed Smith on BlueSky: https://bsky.app/profile/reedsmith.bsky.social Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

For twenty years, hearing the patient meant owning a Voice of Customer program. A survey, a tool, a dashboard you showed the board. On May 18, Qualtrics closed its 6.75 billion dollar acquisition of Press Ganey Forsta. The instrument the majority of U.S. hospitals use to hear their patients is now part of a cross-industry experience platform with its own roadmap. Chris Boyer and Reed Smith take that deal apart and ask who, inside the building, still works for the patient once the listening tool belongs to someone else. This is the third Touch Point in a row circling the same observation. TP485 argued digital equity is a clinical operations problem the health system can no longer outsource. TP487 argued the front door moved off the property. TP489 closes the pattern. The listening apparatus moved too. The episode argues marketing should stop being the collector of patient voice and become its advocate. Owning a program means making the signal presentable. Advocacy means being the named person accountable for the patient's voice surviving contact with a budget meeting. That role has a cost, and the episode names it plainly. If your health system would not fund a single internal advocate to carry the patient's voice into the room, you have already priced what that voice is worth to you. Mentions and links: Qualtrics, Qualtrics Acquires Healthcare Experience Leader Press Ganey Forsta for $6.75 Billion, PR Newswire, May 2026: https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/qualtrics-acquires-healthcare-experience-leader-press-ganey-forsta-for-6-75-billion-302774876.html Becker's Hospital Review, Qualtrics completes $6.75B deal for Press Ganey, May 2026: https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/digital-health/qualtrics-completes-6-75b-deal-for-press-ganey/ CMSWire, After Uncertainty, Qualtrics Closes Deal on $6.75B Press Ganey Forsta Acquisition, May 2026: https://www.cmswire.com/customer-experience/after-uncertainty-qualtrics-finalizes-6-75-billion-acquisition-of-press-ganey-forsta/ Healthcare IT News, Qualtrics eyes a data engine to predict the experiences patients want, May 2026: https://www.healthcareitnews.com/news/qualtrics-eyes-data-engine-predict-experiences-patients-want AHA Center for Health Innovation, What the Qualtrics Acquisition of Press Ganey Forsta Will Mean for Health Care, October 2025: https://www.aha.org/aha-center-health-innovation-market-scan/2025-10-14-what-qualtrics-acquisition-press-ganey-forsta-will-mean-health-care Qualtrics, Synthetic Data for Market Research FAQ, February 2026: https://www.qualtrics.com/articles/strategy-research/synthetic-data-market-research/ b2b International, AI in Market Research: The Limitations of Synthetic Data, August 2025: https://www.b2binternational.com/publications/ai-in-market-research-the-limitations-of-synthetic-data/ Customer Experience Dive, How synthetic data might shape consumer research, November 2024: https://www.customerexperiencedive.com/news/synthetic-data-consumer-research-customer-journey-qualtrics/732408/ Bain & Company, How Synthetic Customers Bring Companies Closer to the Real Ones, June 2025: https://www.bain.com/insights/how-synthetic-customers-bring-companies-closer-to-the-real-ones/ CMS, HCAHPS: Patients' Perspectives of Care Survey, 2025: https://www.cms.gov/medicare/quality/initiatives/hospital-quality-initiative/hcahps-patients-perspectives-care-survey Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

47% of health systems have no clear owner for patient activation. CMOs call it the biggest untapped growth opportunity in healthcare. Marketing has the strongest unclaimed toolkit for the work. Chris Boyer and Reed Smith on whether marketing claims the category, and what it accepts in return. This week's episode runs a thought experiment. What if marketing simply claimed the category. Not partial credit. Not co-ownership with clinical operations. The whole thing, identification through completed care. Chris Boyer and Reed Smith map the teams currently sharing the work, the asymmetric capability marketing brings to it, and the operational accountability marketing has to absorb to make the claim defensible. If the largest unclaimed growth category in healthcare is sitting on your desk and your function has the strongest unclaimed toolkit for it, the question isn't whether you want it. It's whether you're willing to be measured on completed care. Mentions from the Show: Forum for Healthcare Strategists / Digital Health Strategies, Health System Chief Marketing Officer Survey, May 2026 Patient Access Collaborative, Industry Insights 2025: The New Imperative for Patient Access Leadership, September 2025: https://www.patientaccesscollaborative.net/news/industry-insights-2025-the-new-imperative-for-patient-access-leadership Patient Access Collaborative Access Framework, BMC Health Services Research, 2025: https://bmchealthservres.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12913-025-12561-8 Linear Health, Referral Leakage Isn't an Out-of-Network Problem. It's a Follow-Up Problem, March 2026: https://linear.health/blog/referral-leakage-follow-up-problem Hospitalogy, The Health System Navigation Problem and Why You Should Fix Your Leaky Referral Pipeline, April 2025: https://hospitalogy.com/articles/2025-04-21/the-health-system-navigation-problem-and-why-you-should-fix-your-leaky-referral-pipeline/ US Tech Automations, Care Gap Outreach Is Failing: Why Manual Methods Can't Keep Up, April 2026: https://ustechautomations.com/resources/blog/healthcare-care-gap-outreach-pain-solution-2026 QuadMed, Closing Preventive Care Gaps Through Data-Driven Patient Outreach in MyChart, January 2026: https://quadmedical.com/outcomes/closing-preventive-care-gaps-through-data-driven-patient-outreach/ CipherHealth, Advocate Health case study on patient-centered outreach: https://cipherhealth.com/blog/advocate-health-patient-centered-outreach-close-care-gaps/ Health Catalyst / Upfront Healthcare, Scalable Strategies Increase Patient Activation and Close Care Gaps: https://www.healthcatalyst.com/learn/success-stories/closing-care-gaps Upfront Healthcare, Healthcare Psychographics and Segmentation: https://upfronthealthcare.com/psychographics/ Hibbard et al., Development of the Patient Activation Measure (PAM), Health Services Research, 2004: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1361049/ BMC Health Services Research, The role of patient navigators in ambulatory care: https://bmchealthservres.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12913-021-07140-6 Artisan Strategies, Healthcare Patient Acquisition vs Retention Costs 2025: https://www.artisangrowthstrategies.com/blog/healthcare-patient-acquisition-retention-costs-statistics-trends MGMA Stat Poll, No-show fees in medical practices on the rise, January 2025: https://www.mgma.com/mgma-stat/no-show-fees-in-medical-practices-on-the-rise-to-balance-bumpy-attendance-rates Reed Smith on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/reedtsmith/ Chris Boyer on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chrisboyer/ Chris Boyer website: http://www.christopherboyer.com/ Chris Boyer on BlueSky: https://bsky.app/profile/chrisboyer.bsky.social Reed Smith on BlueSky: https://bsky.app/profile/reedsmith.bsky.social Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

TP342 argued that patient access doesn't begin when someone calls for an appointment. It begins much earlier, in the digital layer, before the patient is sure they need care. That premise held. What changed is who owns the layer. Three years ago, the digital layer was something a health system could design, instrument and measure. Today, the patient's first contact happens in a synthesis interface no health system controls. Chris and Reed revisit TP342 this week with a brief intro that connects Reed's "AI and Access" thesis on LinkedIn to the original argument, an honest update on where the premise held, and a frame for listening back with three years of new context. In this encore conversation, Chris and Reed cover: Why patient access doesn't begin at the appointment, and what the real starting point actually is How digital is reshaping the front door of the health system Why "scheduling" is the wrong first metric for an access strategy Where the original argument still holds, and where the synthesis layer changes the picture If access begins in a layer you don't own, then every digital investment downstream of it is downstream of someone else's interface. Mentions from the Show: Original episode: TP342, When Does "Patient Access" Actually Begin? https://touchpoint.health/podcast/tp342-when-does-patient-access-actually-begin/ Reed Smith, "AI and Access in Healthcare" LinkedIn series: https://www.linkedin.com/in/reedtsmith/recent-activity/all/ TP471, Developing a "Route-First" Access Strategy: https://touchpoint.health/podcast/tp471-developing-a-route-first-access-strategy/ TP473, When Demand Outruns Supply: https://touchpoint.health/podcast/tp473-when-demand-outruns-supply/ TP476, Good Enough for People Is Not Good Enough for Machines: https://touchpoint.health/podcast/tp476-good-enough-for-people-is-not-good-enough-for-machines/ Reed Smith on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/reedtsmith/ Chris Boyer on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chrisboyer/ Chris Boyer website: http://www.christopherboyer.com/ Chris Boyer on BlueSky: https://bsky.app/profile/chrisboyer.bsky.social Reed Smith on BlueSky: https://bsky.app/profile/reedsmith.bsky.social Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

60% of healthcare marketing AI spend goes to writing copy. 6% goes to identifying patients who need care. Live from HMPS26 in Salt Lake City, Chris Boyer is joined by Craig Blake of Amsive Health, Jane Crosby of True North Custom and John Berndt of Valtech Health for a panel conversation on what the conference and the new Health System CMO Survey exposed about marketing's role inside health systems. The conversation opens with data and targeting and how the aging population is reshaping who marketers need to reach. It shifts to patient activation and the goldmine of existing patients sitting unactivated inside the system, then to loyalty and the structural problem of marketing's measurement gap. 72% of departments don't track campaigns through to completed care. 47% have no clear owner for activating existing patients. The panel takes a hard look at the simple prescription that "outside thinking will fix this," with Jane and John pushing back on the assumption that CMOs from other industries can move faster inside healthcare than the people already there. The conversation closes on AI: where it's actually being deployed in health systems, why most spend lands on content production rather than patient identification, and how LLM disruption is starting to show up at urgent care visits. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In 2025, U.S. digital health startups raised $14.2 billion. AI-enabled companies captured 54% of it. Every prediction in every roundup carries one quiet assumption underneath it. The patient on the receiving end can use what's being built. The Pew data from January says something different. Two trajectories. One looks like progress in aggregate. The other looks like the patients with the worst health outcomes being structurally locked out of the system that's being built. Chris Boyer and Reed Smith examine what happens when digital strategy and health equity stop being parallel tracks and become the same problem. Why the 2026 AI investment narrative quietly assumes a digitally capable patient, and what the population data actually shows The smartphone-dependent patient most health systems haven't internalized, and why portal UX fails them by design Why disparities in patient portal access are widening for low-income, less-educated and 65-plus populations, even as overall use rises What the 2025 cancellation of federal digital equity funding means for health systems whose patient panels actually need the work done Modality mix as the reframe: digital, phone, in-person and printed channels as a portfolio allocated by segment, not a hierarchy everyone migrates toward The University of Michigan study published in JAMA Network Open in October is the one to anchor on. Researchers looked at 511 hospitals in 51 counties in 17 states where census data showed at least 300,000 LEP residents. 29% of those hospitals offered the patient portal login in English only. 60% offered English plus Spanish. 11% offered three or more languages. In counties specifically chosen because they have hundreds of thousands of patients who don't speak English at home. If your most-invested-in digital experience reaches the patients who already had the most options, and barely touches the patients with the worst outcomes, what is your digital strategy actually optimizing for? Mentions from the Show: Pew Research Center, NPORS 2025, January 2026: https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2026/01/08/internet-use-smartphone-ownership-digital-divides-in-u-s/ Pew Research Center, Internet/Broadband Fact Sheet, December 2025: https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/fact-sheet/internet-broadband/ Pew Research Center, Mobile Fact Sheet, December 2025: https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/fact-sheet/mobile/ OATS / Benton Institute, 19 Million Older Adults Lack Broadband, 2025: https://www.benton.org/blog/19-million-older-adults-lack-broadband Shah & Fiala, Disparities in Patient Portal Access and Utilization, Journal of General Internal Medicine, January 2025: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11606-025-09359-z Chen et al. (U-Michigan), Language Barriers and Access to Hospital Patient Portals in the US, JAMA Network Open, October 2025: https://ihpi.umich.edu/news-events/news/language-barriers-health-care-have-fallen-not-online-study-shows Healthcare Dive, Top healthcare AI trends in 2026 (Rock Health funding data), January 2026: https://www.healthcaredive.com/news/top-healthcare-ai-artificial-intelligence-trends-2026/809493/ HIT Consultant / CB Insights, Q1 2026 Digital Health Funding, April 2026: https://hitconsultant.net/2026/04/20/digital-health-funding-q1-2026-ai-ma-rebound/ Chief Healthcare Executive, AI in health care: 26 leaders offer predictions for 2026, January 2026: https://www.chiefhealthcareexecutive.com/view/ai-in-health-care-26-leaders-offer-predictions-for-2026 JMIR, Bridging Rural America's Digital Divide in Health Care, December 2025: https://www.jmir.org/2025/1/e88833 Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School, Bridging the Digital Divide in Health Care: A New Framework for Equity, January 2025: https://publichealth.jhu.edu/2025/bridging-the-digital-divide-in-health-care-a-new-framework-for-equity NPR, How ending the Digital Equity Act has disrupted programs to help people get online, November 2025: https://www.npr.org/2025/11/12/nx-s1-5594805/how-ending-the-digital-equity-act-has-disrupted-programs-to-help-people-get-online ScienceDirect narrative review, Addressing language barriers in U.S. healthcare, November 2025: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2772632025000418 Reed Smith on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/reedtsmith/ Chris Boyer on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chrisboyer/ Chris Boyer website: http://www.christopherboyer.com/ Chris Boyer on BlueSky: https://bsky.app/profile/chrisboyer.bsky.social Reed Smith on BlueSky: https://bsky.app/profile/reedsmith.bsky.social Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

91% of healthcare marketers say data drives their decisions. 1% can connect the majority of their spend to actual outcomes. That gap is the headline statistic of FreshPaint's 2026 State of Healthcare Marketing report. It's also the wrong place to start the conversation. The harder question isn't whether healthcare marketers can close the attribution gap. It's whether the attribution model the industry has been chasing was ever the right tool for the business healthcare is actually in. Chris Boyer and Reed Smith open the episode with the two structural issues hiding behind the 91/1 paradox, then sit down with Ray Mina, the new CEO of FreshPaint, to walk through the report and what FreshPaint sees across hundreds of health systems managing roughly $2 billion in ad spend. Chris and Reed examine: Why the referring physician is the biggest specialty care channel that no attribution model can see The brand window mismatch, why work that compounds over 18 months keeps getting measured in a 30-day window How the 95:5 reality (most patients aren't in-market this week) breaks the assumptions performance dashboards are built on How attribution model choice (last-click, first-touch, linear, data-driven) quietly decides which work gets credit, and why most teams never make the choice on purpose The CFO shadow attribution problem, why marketing's ROI numbers and finance's numbers align only 54% of the time, and what happens in the 46% Ray's interview lands the practitioner perspective. The 2026 report puts data behind what most marketing leaders are feeling, the era of good enough is over, the Google trap is real and quantifiable, the four-tier maturity spectrum has only 1 to 3% of organizations operating at the top. Ray is honest that getting there is a significant investment, and that the tools have caught up in a way they hadn't three years ago. The conversation gets specific about what's now achievable, what isn't, and what the path looks like for organizations that don't have a Clint Paul or a Blair Premis to lead the work. If your attribution dashboard tells you brand isn't working, check which model you're running before you cut the budget. The answer the dashboard gives depends on the question the model was built to answer. Mentions from the Show: FreshPaint 2026 State of Healthcare Marketing report: https://www.freshpaint.io/state-of-healthcare-marketing Ray Mina on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/raymina/ FreshPaint: https://www.freshpaint.io/ Marketing Rounds podcast (FreshPaint, on YouTube): https://www.youtube.com/@freshpaintio/podcasts Binet & Field, "The Long and the Short of It," IPA: https://ipa.co.uk/knowledge/effectiveness-research-analysis/les-binet-peter-field John Dawes / Ehrenberg-Bass on the 95:5 rule: https://marketingscience.info/news-and-insights/prof-byron-sharp-skewers-binet-tells-marketers-to-sack-agencies-preaching-share-of-voice Forrest et al., "Dropping the Baton: Specialty Referrals in the United States" (PMC): https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3160594/ Improvado Healthcare Marketing Strategy Guide 2026: https://improvado.io/blog/healthcare-marketing-strategy-complete-2026-guide ABA Advertising, "Why Attribution Models in Healthcare Fail," October 2025: https://abaadvertising.com/industry-insights/why-attribution-models-in-healthcare-fail-and-what-to-do-about-it/ Patient Daily on multi-touch attribution in healthcare, January 2026: https://patientdaily.com/stories/679604830-multi-touch-attribution-models-help-healthcare-marketers-improve-campaign-measurement McKinsey, "The CMO's Comeback," 2025: https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/growth-marketing-and-sales/our-insights/the-cmos-comeback-aligning-the-c-suite-to-drive-customer-centric-growth Duke CMO Survey, Fall 2025 (34th edition): https://cmosurvey.org/marketers-claim-a-broader-role-and-increased-influence-amid-pressures/ Uptempo CMO vs. CFO survey, 2025: https://www.uptempo.io/ebook/cmo-vs-cfo/ Michael Kaminsky (Recast), HBR, September 2025: https://hbr.org/2025/09/when-cmos-and-cfos-align-their-kpis-they-deliver-more-value Marketing Dive on the Perion / Advertiser Perceptions report, November 2025: https://www.marketingdive.com/news/the-cmo-cfo-relationship-heres-what-the-numbers-say/806122/ Pedowitz Group Revenue Marketing Index 2025 (citing Gartner CMO Spend Report 2024): https://www.pedowitzgroup.com/revenue-marketing-index Reed Smith on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/reedtsmith/ Chris Boyer on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chrisboyer/ Chris Boyer website: http://www.christopherboyer.com/ Chris Boyer on BlueSky: https://bsky.app/profile/chrisboyer.bsky.social Reed Smith on BlueSky: https://bsky.app/profile/reedsmith.bsky.social Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Of 266 metro areas studied by the Health Care Cost Institute, using 1.3 billion medical claims, only seven have hospital markets that qualify as genuinely competitive. New York. Los Angeles. Chicago. Riverside. Philadelphia. Miami. Washington, D.C. Everywhere else, patients in most service lines are not shopping. They are arriving. And healthcare built a decade of digital strategy on the premise that they were choosing. That doesn't mean the premise was entirely wrong, and it doesn't mean the work was wasted. It means the consumerism frame that the industry borrowed from retail was always a partial fit, and the digital investments that had the most impact were often working for reasons the frame didn't quite describe. Insurance constrains patient options before anyone opens a browser. Crisis eliminates preference entirely. Specialist and complex care decisions follow referral patterns, not consumer shopping behavior. The "competitive market" that consumerism theory assumes exists reliably in about seven cities. The friction-reduction work, though, was real and its effects are measurable. In June 2019, 10% of Americans had ever had a telehealth visit. Today 54% have, and 89% report satisfaction with their most recent virtual care experience. A 2025 access-to-care study found that 23.3% of patients who experienced appointment scheduling friction said it led to worsened health, and more than half switched providers. That work didn't succeed by winning a competitive fight. It succeeded by removing barriers that had always been there. Chris Boyer and Reed Smith examine what the last decade of digital investment was actually accomplishing, where the consumerism frame helped and where it pointed the work in the wrong direction: Why healthcare "choice" was always constrained by insurance networks, referral patterns and market structure, before anyone built a digital front door What the friction-reduction work was actually doing, and why it had value the consumerism frame didn't fully explain Price transparency as the case study for what happens when the wrong frame drives the deliverable Why telehealth succeeded by removing access barriers rather than winning a consumer preference battle What complexity management looks like as a forward frame, and why it applies to patients, staff and referring physicians equally Price transparency is the sharpest example of the frame producing the wrong result. The CMS Hospital Price Transparency Rule was built on a consumerism premise: give patients price data, they will shop, prices will fall. As of November 2024, only 21% of hospitals were fully compliant with all requirements. The GAO found the published data so difficult to use that most stakeholders relied on third-party vendors just to make it parseable. The rule produced compliance behavior aimed at regulators. It did not produce a consumer tool. The frame predicted the wrong outcome. If the work was never really about out-competing a rival health system, the question worth asking now is whether the experience built in most markets actually makes the complexity easier for the person who has no choice but to navigate it. Mentions from the Show: HCCI Health Cost Landscape, April 2026: https://healthcostinstitute.org/all-hcci-reports/what-is-the-health-cost-landscape/ AJMC / HCCI Healthy Marketplace Index: https://www.ajmc.com/view/nearly-75-of-us-hospital-markets-highly-concentrated-hcci-report-shows Axios Future of Health Care Newsletter, April 2026: https://www.axios.com/newsletters/axios-future-of-health-care-ee174520-3387-11f1-8096-e7d285bf9bf6.html Patient Rights Advocate, Seventh Semi-Annual Hospital Price Transparency Report, November 2024: https://www.paubox.com/blog/hospital-price-transparency-requirements-and-compliance-challenges GAO-25-106995, Health Care Transparency, October 2024: https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-25-106995 Perficient Access to Care Research, 2025: https://blogs.perficient.com/2025/07/09/rethinking-access-to-care-maslow-and-transtheoretical-model-inform-smarter-digital-investments/ hims & hers National Survey / State of Telehealth 2025: https://www.dimins.com/blog/2025/04/03/the-state-of-telehealth-in-2025/ Press Ganey, Evolving Consumer Expectations in Healthcare, 2024: https://www.pressganey.com/hx-insights/the-evolving-expectations-of-todays-healthcare-consumer/ Commonwealth Fund, Consumer Choice in U.S. Health Care, 2021: https://www.commonwealthfund.org/publications/fund-reports/2021/nov/consumer-choice-us-health-care-using-insights-from-past Reed Smith on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/reedtsmith/ Chris Boyer on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chrisboyer/ Chris Boyer website: http://www.christopherboyer.com/ Chris Boyer on BlueSky: https://bsky.app/profile/chrisboyer.bsky.social Reed Smith on BlueSky: https://bsky.app/profile/reedsmith.bsky.social Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Healthcare has been running AI pilots for three years. Most of them worked. Almost none of them scaled. That's not a coincidence, and it's not a technology problem. A pilot is designed to succeed under favorable conditions: dedicated staff, narrow scope, a vendor highly motivated to deliver, and leadership that approved the project and needs it to justify the decision. None of those conditions survive contact with the enterprise. The pilot didn't reveal whether the technology could scale. It revealed whether the technology could perform in a demonstration. The harder question — whether the organization itself is willing to change to support it — never gets formally asked. By the time the pilot ends, the window for asking it has usually closed. The results go into a deck. The deck gets presented once. The next pilot begins. Chris Boyer and Reed Smith examine what perpetual piloting actually costs health systems, and why the gap between "we piloted this" and "we run this" is where most healthcare transformation quietly ends: Why the conditions that make a pilot succeed are precisely what makes it an unreliable predictor of enterprise viability How piloting became a way to signal innovation without requiring organizational change Why the decision to pilot and the decision to scale are different decisions — and why most organizations only make the first one What the one healthcare AI use case that has actually graduated pilots has in common with successful enterprise deployments in other industries What it looks like to design a pilot you actually intend to graduate, starting before the pilot runs A new Kyndryl study found 76% of healthcare organizations report having more AI pilot programs than they can scale. Not more than they've scaled. More than they can scale. That number is not a technology indictment. It's an organizational one. The question for every health system running pilots right now isn't whether the technology worked. It did. The question is whether the organization is prepared to decide. Mentions from the Show: TP427: The Case for Failing Faster to Address Disruption: touchpoint.health Kyndryl Research, March 2026: https://www.healthcareittoday.com/2026/03/08/bonus-features-march-8-2026-69-of-physicians-struggle-to-access-recent-records-from-outside-providers-76-of-healthcare-orgs-have-more-ai-pilot-programs-than-they-can-scale-plus/  Define Ventures C-Suite AI Survey via Healthcare Finance News, 2024: https://www.healthcarefinancenews.com/news/payers-providers-increasing-investments-ai  McKinsey, Reimagining Healthcare Service Operations in the Age of AI, 2024: https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/healthcare/our-insights/reimagining-healthcare-industry-service-operations-in-the-age-of-ai Bain & Company / KLAS Research, Healthcare IT Investment: AI Moves from Pilot to Production, October 2025: https://www.bain.com/insights/healthcare-it-investment-ai-moves-from-pilot-to-production/ Reed Smith on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/reedtsmith/ Chris Boyer on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chrisboyer/ Chris Boyer website: http://www.christopherboyer.com/ Chris Boyer on BlueSky: https://bsky.app/profile/chrisboyer.bsky.social Reed Smith on BlueSky: https://bsky.app/profile/reedsmith.bsky.social Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Health systems have spent decades building brand equity. Almost none of that investment touched the data layer that determines how AI represents them to patients who never reach the website. When an AI agent tells a patient that an urgent care is closed and it isn't, the brand absorbs the damage. The data that caused the failure lived in a system marketing didn't own, maintained by a team that didn't know data accuracy was a brand function. That gap isn't a communication problem between marketing and IT. It's a structural one: nobody assigned it. The shift that makes this urgent isn't AI in the abstract. It's the move from owned channels to intermediary channels. Healthcare built its brand infrastructure to control what patients see on the website, in the portal, in the ad. When AI becomes the intermediary, the brand is only as strong as the data AI is reading. Emotional resonance, institutional reputation, patient experience scores: none of that translates to machine-readable signals. The data either says what it needs to say, or it doesn't. Chris Boyer and Reed Smith frame the investment paradox before bringing in their guest: Why healthcare brand strategy has a structural blind spot and where the money actually goes What the lifecycle of a data accuracy failure looks like inside a health system, from the physician directory to the patient complaint Why data accuracy is a brand investment decision, not an IT readiness decision The three accountability layers most health systems haven't assigned: operational, structural and strategic Why the urgency is new even if the underlying problem isn't Martha Van Berkel, CEO and co-founder of Schema App, joins to provide the mechanism. She draws the line between schema markup as a page-level tactic and schema markup as trust infrastructure: the data layer that lets organizations control how AI represents them rather than waiting to see what AI infers. She also distinguishes data readiness from human readiness, two separate organizational problems that healthcare is conflating, and offers a practical starting point for CMOs who are looking at this for the first time. If your brand strategy doesn't include a data accuracy component, you've built something worth protecting on a foundation you haven't checked. Mentions from the Show: Martha Van Berkel on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/martha-van-berkel Schema App: https://www.schemaapp.com Reed Smith on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/reedtsmith/ Chris Boyer on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chrisboyer/ Chris Boyer website: http://www.christopherboyer.com/ Chris Boyer on BlueSky: https://bsky.app/profile/chrisboyer.bsky.social Reed Smith on BlueSky: https://bsky.app/profile/reedsmith.bsky.social Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

User-centered design has one quiet flaw: it assumes a single user. Healthcare has spent 15 years learning to center the patient. Journey maps, empathy research, consumer insight — the infrastructure for understanding the person receiving care is real and growing. What healthcare hasn't built is any equivalent accountability for the people expected to deliver that experience. The scheduler fielding calls a campaign generated. The service line director whose workflow just changed. The clinical staff asked to execute a new pathway on top of everything else they're already carrying. They aren't in the brief. They aren't in the journey map. And when the initiative falls apart at rollout, nobody calls it a design failure. They call it a change management problem. They say staff were resistant. They say operations didn't prioritize it. What they don't say: those people were never treated as users. Chris Boyer and Reed Smith examine why the internal user experience of a healthcare initiative is structurally unmeasured, organizationally unowned, and almost always addressed too late: Why patient experience has infrastructure behind it (scores, research budgets, dedicated roles) and the internal user has almost none How speed-to-launch pressure and diffuse rework costs produce a decision that looks rational and produces predictable failure The measurement gap: what gets measured gets designed for, and nobody is measuring whether the service line director's needs were addressed Why the seam between marketing and operations is unmeasured and why unmeasured seams don't get fixed How accumulated distrust compounds over initiatives and why "we've always done it this way" is often less about habit than about what the process has taught people to expect Steve Koch, co-founder of Cast and Hue, brings the frameworks: Jobs to Be Done and the four forces applied not to patients, but to the people who execute the work. His argument is the practical extension of the structural case - empathy interviews before the brief is built, not alignment meetings after the design is done. If your organization has patient experience leadership and no one whose job includes the internal user experience of your initiatives, you already know where things break. The question is whether you're willing to call it a design problem. Mentions from the Show: Prosci Best Practices in Change Management, 12th Edition https://www.prosci.com/blog/the-correlation-between-change-management-and-project-success Prosci / Stakeholder Inclusion Survey. https://www.prosci.com/blog/how-to-use-a-stakeholder-engagement-plan-sep StatPearls / NCBI Bookshelf — Change Management in Health Care https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK459380/ Cast and Hue — https://www.castandhue.com Steve Koch on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/stevepkoch/ Reed Smith on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/reedtsmith/ Chris Boyer on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/chrisboyer/ Chris Boyer on BlueSky https://bsky.app/profile/chrisboyer.bsky.social Reed Smith on BlueSky https://bsky.app/profile/reedsmith.bsky.social Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Running sprints inside an organization that hasn't changed anything else isn't transformation. It's double the work. Chris Boyer and Reed Smith examine what isolated Agile adoption actually produces in health systems — and what it exposes about the organizational infrastructure no methodology can fix on its own. Mentions from the Show: Only 23% of Agile-experienced executives say their org can shift resources quickly; only 34% say culture naturally enables Agile: Bain & Company, "How Agile Is Powering Healthcare Innovation" — https://www.bain.com/insights/how-agile-is-powering-healthcare-innovation/ Siloed structures as primary barrier to Agile at scale in large enterprises: Agility at Scale research review, 2025 — https://agility-at-scale.com/implementing/transformation-leadership/ 55% of organizations cite poor leadership as top barrier to cross-functional OKR alignment (prerequisite for Agile): Hyperdrive Agile OKR research, 2024 — https://hyperdriveagile.com/articles/breaking-silos-how-advanced-okr-cross-functional-performance-drives-unprecedented-growth-83 CEO "follow me, I'm just behind you" case study — management stuck in old-fashioned way while development teams ran Agile: Bain & Company, "Agile Innovation" — https://www.bain.com/insights/agile-innovation/ Healthcare structural and cultural barriers to Agile implementation: Rahman et al., SSRN, August 2024 — https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5041524 Real Agile blockers: decisions, load, trust, habits — finance and HR structural changes required: Bee'z Consulting / Scrum Alliance, 2025 — https://www.beez-consulting.com/blog/adopting-an-agile-culture-and-practices-in-healthcare-challenges-and-solutions Agile at scale requires finance, HR, and governance to shift — not just team-level training: Scrum Alliance, Coaching for Transformation microcredential framework — https://www.scrumalliance.org/microcredentials/coaching-for-transformation-sustaining-change Reed Smith on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/reedtsmith/ Chris Boyer on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chrisboyer/ Chris Boyer website: http://www.christopherboyer.com/ Chris Boyer on BlueSky: https://bsky.app/profile/chrisboyer.bsky.social Reed Smith on BlueSky: https://bsky.app/profile/reedsmith.bsky.social Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The language of lifecycle engagement, continuous care relationships, and whole-person experience has fully colonized healthcare strategy decks. Marketing invested in journey maps. Leadership signed off on CRM platforms and digital front door initiatives. The consumer lifecycle is drawn on whiteboards in conference rooms across the country. And yet: the scheduling system still fills slots, not relationships. The EMR still closes the encounter at discharge. The call center still routes to availability, not context. The follow-up that fires after a visit is an automated survey, not a clinical touchpoint. The patient who received a personalized "we care about your whole health" email walks into an appointment where the provider has never seen it. Healthcare has rebranded the patient journey. It hasn't redesigned the organization that delivers it. Chris Boyer and Reed Smith examine the specific gap between what health systems promise through their consumer experience strategy and what patients actually encounter when the operational infrastructure hasn't changed: Why "consumer journey" became a marketing framework rather than an operational commitment — and what got left out when it did The post-discharge cliff: why most health systems treat discharge as an endpoint when a journey framework requires it to be a transition How scheduling logic, EMR workflows, and call center scripts were built for encounter resolution — not relationship continuity The channel handoff failure: why patients who begin digitally often restart from zero when they call or show up Who actually owns the seam between departments — and why the honest answer is usually nobody The episode ends with a direct challenge: before your organization launches its next lifecycle campaign or publishes its next patient journey map, someone should be able to answer a basic question. What is the operational commitment behind this? Not the technology investment. The operational commitment. If your CEO asked you today to show them where in the organization the consumer journey is operationally owned, could you give a straight answer? Mentions from the Show: "Value-based care adoption grows, but challenges remain": https://www.hfma.org/reference/value-based-care-adoption-challenges/ "Innovation in Pursuit of Patient-Centered Care": https://catalyst.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/CAT.24.0245 "Reducing Hospital Readmissions": https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK606114/ "Reducing readmission rates through a discharge follow-up service": https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6616175/ "What is Healthcare CRM?": https://www.leadsquared.com/industries/healthcare/what-is-healthcare-crm/ "The continued growth of VBC, in 4 charts": https://www.advisory.com/daily-briefing/2025/06/04/vbc "Engaging Complex Health System Boards in Quality and Safety Governance":  https://catalyst.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/CAT.25.0276 Reed Smith on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/reedtsmith/ Chris Boyer on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chrisboyer/ Chris Boyer website: http://www.christopherboyer.com/ Chris Boyer on BlueSky: https://bsky.app/profile/chrisboyer.bsky.social Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Automation was sold as a way to scale good experiences. It scales bad ones just as efficiently. Healthcare has spent the last decade deploying chatbots, portals, AI-generated content, and personalization engines in the name of patient experience. The ROI case was built on efficiency: lower cost per interaction, faster throughput, reduced call center volume. What was never put on the balance sheet is what happens to patient trust when those systems fail — and they fail regularly, quietly, and without anyone in the organization knowing it happened. That's trust debt. Every time an automated system fails a patient and the patient absorbs the cost silently — closes the portal, hangs up, stops engaging — a withdrawal is made from an account most health systems never knew they had. It doesn't show up in satisfaction scores. It shows up in churn, in rising call volumes that automation was supposed to reduce, in patients who schedule once and don't come back. Chris Boyer and Reed Smith work through where the debt is accumulating right now — and where automation is actually doing the opposite: Why AI-generated health content optimized for fluency, not accuracy, is seeding doubt in the patients most likely to engage with it How portal adoption metrics are measuring the wrong signal — and why enrollment without satisfaction is just a larger audience for your frustration Where DXP personalization crosses from service into surveillance — and how thin consent frameworks are accelerating that perception What trust-building automation actually looks like, and what it has in common with the best human interactions in healthcare The three questions every team should ask before the next automated touchpoint goes live The research is catching up to what practitioners already sense. AI safety disclaimers in patient-facing responses dropped from 26% in 2022 to under 1% in 2025. Sixty-one percent of patients say they'd consider switching providers over a better digital experience. And the 2025 Edelman Trust and Health report found that no institution — not business, not government, not NGOs — is trusted to address patient needs. Healthcare is operating in a trust deficit it didn't create alone, but automation is making it worse in ways that are largely invisible to the organizations doing it. The question isn't whether to automate. It's whether you've been honest about what you're actually scaling. Mentions from the Show: TP456: When AI Speaks for the Patient — touchpoint.health TP460: When Digital Speaks for the Patient — touchpoint.health TP470: When AI Becomes the First Stop for Care — touchpoint.health AI errors in healthcare — Healthcare Brew, August 2025: https://www.healthcare-brew.com/stories/2025/08/20/healthcare-execs-ai-errors Declining medical safety messaging in AI — npj Digital Medicine, October 2025: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41746-025-01943-1 ECRI Top 10 Patient Safety Concerns 2025: https://www.medtechdive.com/news/ecri-patient-safety-report-2025-ai/742114/ ONC Patient Portal Access Data Brief 2024: https://healthit.gov/data/data-briefs/individuals-access-and-use-patient-portals-and-smartphone-health-apps-2024/ Experian Health patient portal switching stat: https://www.experian.com/healthcare/solutions/patient-engagement-solutions 2025 Edelman Trust Barometer: Trust and Health: https://www.edelman.com/trust/2025/trust-barometer/special-report-health 2026 Edelman Trust Barometer: https://www.edelman.com/trust/2026/trust-barometer Reed Smith on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/reedtsmith/ Chris Boyer on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chrisboyer/ Chris Boyer website: http://www.christopherboyer.com/ Chris Boyer on BlueSky: https://bsky.app/profile/chrisboyer.bsky.social Reed Smith on BlueSky: https://bsky.app/profile/reedsmith.bsky.social Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Health systems have spent 20 years optimizing for the patient who searches, clicks, and reads. They are not optimizing for the agent that queries, evaluates, and routes. Those are two different audiences — and most organizations are only ready for one of them. The digital front door was built on a human assumption: that discovery begins with a search, passes through a website, and ends in conversion. Agentic AI doesn't use doors. It uses structured pathways, machine-readable attributes, and decision logic that operates entirely outside your owned channel. The routing is already happening. The question is whether health systems are in the decision set - or invisible to it. The infrastructure making this possible isn't speculative. Model Context Protocol (MCP), now an open standard backed by Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google DeepMind, defines how AI agents connect to external tools and data sources. NLWeb, launched by Microsoft in May 2025, turns websites into machine-queryable endpoints. Together, they create an execution layer on top of your digital ecosystem. And most hospital websites aren't built to be legible to it. Chris Boyer and Reed Smith work through what this shift actually requires: Why the patient journey now runs conversation → AI interpretation → machine routing → conversion — and health systems control only the last step What breaks when machines encounter unstructured provider bios, inconsistent service line naming, and scheduling availability gaps Why brand strength built on emotional resonance doesn't translate to machine-readable signals — and what does The gap between "78% of health systems engaged in AI projects" and the 52% that feel operationally ready to implement them What a practical machine readiness audit looks like, and who inside the organization should own it The organizational problem is as hard as the technical one. Marketing owns content but rarely owns schema. IT owns infrastructure but rarely thinks in terms of machine-readable patient experience. Someone has to own machine readiness as a cross-functional problem. Right now, almost no one does. If your digital strategy was designed for the patient who searches, clicks, and reads -  it was not designed for the agent that queries, evaluates, and routes. Mentions From the Show:  Dean Browell on LinkedIn Danny Fell on LinkedIn Reed Smith on LinkedIn Chris Boyer on LinkedIn Chris Boyer website Chris Boyer on BlueSky Reed Smith on BlueSky Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Artificial intelligence is being framed as innovation. But sometimes it sounds a lot like cost cutting. In this episode of Touch Point, hosts Chris Boyer and Reed Smith tackle a provocative question sparked by recent headlines describing workforce reductions as “AI productivity savings.” If thousands of jobs are eliminated under the banner of efficiency, is that transformation — or just margin management with better branding? Healthcare is under pressure to do more with less. AI is now embedded in marketing, access, scheduling, operations, and content workflows. But how are we actually measuring success? Is it: Revenue growth? Cost efficiency? Improved patient experience? Or simply labor reduction? Chris and Reed introduce a balanced AI value framework built around four dimensions: growth impact, cost efficiency, experience enhancement, and trust durability. Because in healthcare, productivity alone is not strategy — and cost savings without context can distort behavior. Then, they welcome guest experts Danny Fell and Dean Browell for a deeper executive-level discussion on how to position AI initiatives to the C-suite. How do you communicate long-term brand and trust value in a boardroom that applauds immediate cost reductions? And how do you avoid what they call “productivity theater” in the AI era? This episode challenges healthcare leaders to rethink ROI before AI reshapes the definition of value itself. Mentions From the Show:  Dean Browell on LinkedIn Danny Fell on LinkedIn Reed Smith on LinkedIn Chris Boyer on LinkedIn Chris Boyer website Chris Boyer on BlueSky Reed Smith on BlueSky Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Healthcare marketers are seeing something strange: campaigns look like they're working, but analytics can't explain why. In this episode, Chris Boyer and Reed Smith unpack what's really happening inside healthcare's “dark funnel” — the growing share of patient decision-making that happens outside trackable channels. Patients are increasingly influenced by AI summaries, private communities, reputation signals, and access realities long before they ever visit a website. By the time someone schedules care, the decision has already been shaped — just not in places marketing dashboards can see. This conversation explores: What the dark funnel actually is and why it's accelerating in healthcare How AI tools are reshaping discovery before patients ever search Why reputation now acts as a signal of future loyalty, not just a score Where attribution breaks down — and why that doesn't mean marketing is failing How health systems can influence decisions they'll never directly measure If patient intent is forming off the radar, the real question isn't how to track it — it's how to stay relevant when your brand is being inferred instead of discovered. Mentions From the Show:  Reed Smith on LinkedIn Chris Boyer on LinkedIn Chris Boyer website Chris Boyer on BlueSky Reed Smith on BlueSky Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Healthcare talks a lot about growth, access, and consumerism. But there's a growing problem hiding in plain sight: demand is getting easier to create, while supply remains stubbornly hard to deliver. In this episode, Chris Boyer and Reed Smith unpack a tension many health systems are feeling but rarely name out loud. As digital marketing, online scheduling, and consumer-first strategies mature, organizations are getting better at generating demand. Too often, that demand runs headfirst into real constraints on the supply side: provider schedules, clinic capacity, access center workflows, EMR logic, bylaws, and reimbursement realities. The result? Campaigns that work. Experiences that break. And patients who did everything right, only to be told there are no appointments available. The conversation starts with a quick reset on classic supply-and-demand economics and why those models fall apart in healthcare. From there, Chris and Reed explore: Why marketing is being asked to drive demand without influence over supply How digital tools are exposing access gaps that have always existed The disconnect between growth strategy, clinical operations, and access management Why “no appointments available” may be the most expensive UX pattern in healthcare What a route-first approach to access could look like in practice This is not about blaming clinicians or oversimplifying a complex system. It's about naming the mismatch, understanding the incentives, and starting a more honest conversation about how demand and supply actually meet inside modern health systems. If healthcare is serious about consumerism, it has to get serious about access. Mentions From the Show:  Reed Smith on LinkedIn Chris Boyer on LinkedIn Chris Boyer website Chris Boyer on BlueSky Reed Smith on BlueSky Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Trust in institutions is declining, and healthcare is not immune. At the same time, patients are relying more heavily than ever on what other people say online to decide where, when, and whether to seek care. In this episode of Touch Point, hosts Chris Boyer and Reed Smith revisit reputation management with a fresh lens. Not as a checklist of review sites to monitor, but as a leading indicator of patient trust, experience, and long-term loyalty. The conversation explores how reputation is shifting beyond Google and Facebook into places health systems rarely control or even monitor. From Reddit threads and local forums to unsolicited patient stories that carry more weight than polished testimonials, reputation today is fragmented, emotional, and deeply contextual. Chris and Reed also unpack a growing tension in healthcare marketing and patient experience. As more organizations are encouraged to solicit reviews through formal programs, are we improving transparency or simply priming the pump. And how should teams interpret star ratings versus narrative feedback when trying to understand real service breakdowns and recovery opportunities. Key topics include: Why declining trust makes reputation a strategic asset, not a marketing afterthought The difference between solicited and unsolicited reviews and why it matters How online reputation signals future loyalty and patient experience scores Where reputation actually forms today and why traditional monitoring tools fall short How health systems can move from reactive review management to meaningful insight and action This episode is a practical, opinionated update for anyone responsible for brand, experience, access, or digital strategy in healthcare. Reputation is no longer just about what people say. It is about what organizations choose to hear and how they respond. Mentions From the Show:  Edelman Trust Barometer Reed Smith on LinkedIn Chris Boyer on LinkedIn Chris Boyer website Chris Boyer on BlueSky Reed Smith on BlueSky Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Access is still one of healthcare's most talked-about problems. But a year after our last access-focused episode, the conversation has shifted in quieter and more consequential ways. In this episode, Chris Boyer and Reed Smith revisit access not as a single front door problem, but as a routing challenge shaped by workforce constraints, digital behavior, reimbursement realities, and patient expectations that continue to evolve. Rather than rehashing familiar headlines about staffing shortages or online scheduling, they introduce a route-first access strategy. One that prioritizes guiding patients to the right care, at the right time, through the right channel. Sometimes that means digital. Sometimes it does not. The conversation covers what has actually changed over the past year, where health systems are making progress, and where access friction has simply moved instead of disappearing. Chris and Reed also explore how consumer expectations are colliding with clinical capacity, why access success increasingly depends on orchestration rather than availability, and what leaders should stop measuring if they want real improvement. This is a practical, forward-looking discussion for healthcare leaders who want to move beyond access theater and design experiences that work in the real world. Mentions From the Show:  Fierce Healthcare 2026 outlook on hybrid care Gartner Strategic Predictions for 2026  Zocdoc 2024 What Patients Want report  Reed Smith on LinkedIn Chris Boyer on LinkedIn Chris Boyer website Chris Boyer on BlueSky Reed Smith on BlueSky Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

For years, healthcare has talked about patients as informed consumers. Now, many of them are showing up informed before they ever touch a health system. In this episode of Touch Point, hosts Chris Boyer and Reed Smith unpack what's behind OpenAI's launch of ChatGPT Health and why it signals a meaningful shift in how people seek, process, and act on health information. The conversation starts with a look at new research from OpenAI that shows how millions of people are already using ChatGPT for healthcare related questions. Not hypotheticals. Real behavior. Real scale. From understanding lab results to navigating insurance, AI has quietly become a first stop in the health journey. From there, Chris and Reed break down what ChatGPT Health actually does, what it does not do, and why that distinction matters for health systems, marketers, and experience leaders. They explore how AI is filling gaps created by short appointments, fragmented records, and limited access, and what that means for trust, preparation, and patient expectations moving forward. They then feature an interview with Brandon Scott, Chief Innovation and Growth Officer of TenAdams, that grounds the discussion in reality, examining where AI genuinely helps patients, where it creates new tensions, and why slow moving, walled garden thinking is increasingly out of step with how people now manage their health. This is not an episode about replacing clinicians. It is about understanding a new layer of the patient experience that already exists and deciding how healthcare organizations respond to it. If your digital strategy still assumes the website is the first interaction, or that education starts after the visit, this episode will challenge that assumption. Mentions From the Show:  OpenAI — AI as a Healthcare Ally (Jan 2026) OpenAI — Introducing ChatGPT Health ChatGPT Health launches to serve “hundreds of millions” seeking health and wellness guidance each week Anthropic joins OpenAI's push into health care with new Claude tools Brandon Scott on LinkedIn TenAdams.com Reed Smith on LinkedIn Chris Boyer on LinkedIn Chris Boyer website Chris Boyer on BlueSky Reed Smith on BlueSky Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

As healthcare heads into 2026, the signals are getting harder to ignore. Financial pressure is mounting. Consumer expectations are accelerating. And digital strategies that once felt optional are now core infrastructure. In this episode, hosts Chris Boyer and Reed Smith kick off the new year with a trend-focused conversation unpacking what is actually changing across healthcare, digital strategy, and consumer behavior and what that means for health systems of all shapes and sizes. The discussion spans three critical areas. First, how hospitals, health systems, and academic medical centers are navigating margin pressure, workforce challenges, and increasing scrutiny while being asked to do more with less. Second, how digital and marketing strategies are evolving from campaign-driven efforts into intelligence and experience infrastructure powered by data, AI, and governance. And third, how patient expectations are shifting as consumers bring behaviors learned from retail, banking, and technology into healthcare. Rather than predictions for prediction's sake, this episode focuses on real signals already shaping 2026 and the strategic implications leaders need to understand now. From hybrid care and digital access to AI-enabled personalization and experience design, this conversation is about where healthcare is heading and how prepared organizations truly are. Whether you work in marketing, digital experience, strategy, or executive leadership, this episode offers a grounded look at what is changing, what is breaking, and where health systems need to adapt next. Mentions From the Show:  Chartis: From reactive to proactive: Health systems look to AI and digital to flip the healthcare delivery paradigm within 5 years Fierce Healthcare: 2026 Outlook: Hybrid care companies poised for growth driven by economic, policy tailwinds Gartner: AI's Influence Runs Deeper Than You Think — 2026 Gartner Strategic Predictions Explain Why Paul Keckley website HealthGrades: Special Report: Seven Hospital Marketing Trends You Should Know in 2026 KLAS: AI being used more often at point of care, KLAS research shows Salesforce: The Ninth Edition State of Marketing Report Telus Digital: Six healthcare trends reshaping digital care in 2025 with expert insights on AI, ops, mobile and more The Economist: The truth about affordability Reed Smith on LinkedIn Chris Boyer on LinkedIn Chris Boyer website Chris Boyer on BlueSky Reed Smith on BlueSky Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Every year, they pause to look back at what resonated most with the Touch Point community. In our 2025 Touch Point Podcast Listener Choice Awards show, hosts Chris Boyer and Reed Smith share a behind-the-scenes look at how the show performed this year and what listeners told us matters most. They break down where the show;s audience is tuning in from, including top cities, states, and countries. They also share download trends across the year and highlights from Spotify Wrapped that show how Touch Point is performing inside the Spotify ecosystem. Lastly, they also dig into the results of our annual listener survey, covering what topics resonated, how people are using the podcast in their work, and what they want more of in the year ahead. And of course, they close with the awards. Best Episode of the Year goes to TP421 – The Evolution of Patient Experience, a conversation that traced how experience has shifted from satisfaction scores to a broader human and digital lens. Best Guest Interview of the Year goes to John Berndt of Valtech, recognized for a conversation that challenged how healthcare organizations think about digital trust, experience, and transformation. Think of this episode as a year-in-review, a thank you to our listeners, and a preview of where Touch Point is heading next. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In case you missed it, this episode tackles one of the biggest shifts quietly reshaping healthcare marketing: search is no longer about winning keywords. It is about understanding intent, context, and how AI now mediates discovery. Chris Boyer and Reed Smith revisit a timely conversation on how generative AI is changing the rules of SEO and why many traditional optimization tactics no longer hold up. As search results become AI-assembled experiences rather than ranked lists, health systems are being forced to rethink how they create, structure, and distribute content. This ICYMI episode explores why SEO now looks less like a checklist and more like a precision sport, where strategy, patience, and adaptability matter more than brute force tactics. Thought leader Carrie Liken joins the conversation to unpack what Google's generative search future means for healthcare organizations, including the rise of zero-click discovery, the collapse of keyword-first strategies, and how hospitals can stay visible when AI becomes the first interaction layer. If your SEO playbook still assumes users are clicking blue links, this is one worth revisiting. Mentions From the Show:  How AI is reshaping SEO: Challenges, opportunities, and brand strategies for 2025 Search Engine Land Search trends for 2025: Is a new ecosystem emerging? 2025 trend: Generative search will become the new normal, shaking up ad spend How to navigate the changing landscape of search in 2025 AI-driven search ad spending set to surge to $26 billion by 2029, data shows Carrie Liken on LinkedIn Carrie Liken on SubStack Reed Smith on LinkedIn Chris Boyer on LinkedIn Chris Boyer website Chris Boyer on BlueSky Reed Smith on BlueSky Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We are back with the second half of our annual Holiday Sampler, featuring the remaining three episodes that round out Touch Point's most downloaded shows of 2025. These are the conversations listeners kept coming back to. The ones that sparked follow-up questions, internal debates, and hallway conversations at conferences. Together, they reflect the themes that defined healthcare marketing and digital strategy this year, including privacy-first advertising, AI-driven content strategy, and a rethinking of reputation management beyond simple star ratings. In this episode, Reed Smith and Chris Boyer revisit three standout conversations that explore where digital transformation is actually working inside health systems, how AI is reshaping consumer expectations, and why trust and access remain the real competitive differentiators. As a reminder, the annual Touch Point listener survey is still open through December 19. This is your opportunity to vote for Best Guest and Best Interview of the Year. The race is close, and every vote matters. Consider this the second half of the sampler platter. Different flavors, big ideas, and still plenty of great choices on the table. Mentions From the Show:  Episode 420 - The 2025 State of Digital Advertising for Healthcare TP423 – Healthcare Content in 2025: AI, Composability, and the Content Stack TP424 – Rethinking Reputation Management (Moving Beyond Google Reviews) 2025 Annual TouchPoint Listener Survey Reed Smith on LinkedIn Chris Boyer on LinkedIn Chris Boyer website Chris Boyer on BlueSky Reed Smith on BlueSky Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Health care did not have a quiet year. AI, experience, platforms, and “vibe” all took turns in the spotlight. In this first half of our Holiday Sampler, hosts Chris Boyer and Reed Smith revisit four of the most downloaded Touch Point episodes of 2025. These clips capture the themes that kept listeners coming back. This episode features standout moments from: Episode 421: The Evolution of Patient Experience We look at how patient experience grew up. From the days of satisfaction surveys and HCAHPS to a broader, human centered view that includes families, communities, and digital expectations. This clip returns to the point where COVID, consumer behavior, and online access collided and forced health systems to rethink what experience really means. Episode 428: Breaking the Healthcare Content Mold AI quietly moved from pilot projects to everyday content work. In this segment, we revisit how health systems are using AI to draft education materials, website copy, social content, and SEO at scale, while staying compliant and avoiding PHI. The clip focuses on the human plus AI dynamic and why better prompts and guardrails lead to better outputs. Episode 431: AI, Are You Killing Our Vibe Vibe marketing became one of the buzz phrases of the year. Here we unpack what people actually mean when they talk about “vibe,” how it influences discovery and trust, and where AI fits in as a tool to shape and scale emotional connection. This highlight walks through concrete examples of how teams brought vibe into campaigns without losing substance. Episode 435: The Website Is Now a Platform In this conversation, we challenged the idea of the hospital website as a static brochure. The clip you will hear looks at what happens when you treat the site as a true platform for access, engagement, and growth. We talk about scheduling flows, self service tools, data capture, and the privacy and trust questions that come with a more intelligent experience. It is a snapshot of how digital front doors are becoming digital operating systems. Taken together, these four episodes show how quickly the ground is shifting under healthcare marketers and digital leaders. Experience is broader. Content is more automated. Brand is more emotional. The website is more operational. The leaders who follow these threads are already working differently heading into 2026. Our annual listener survey is open through December 19. It is your chance to vote for the best guest and best interview of the year and to tell us what you want more of in the year ahead. We will share the results and celebrate the winners in our final episode of 2025. Mentions From the Show:  2025 Annual TouchPoint Listener Survey Reed Smith on LinkedIn Chris Boyer on LinkedIn Chris Boyer website Chris Boyer on BlueSky Reed Smith on BlueSky Final note Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode, hosts Chris Boyer and Reed Smith explore how health systems can make smarter decisions about Human In The Loop and Human Out Of The Loop models, and why these choices will define trust, safety, and experience in the coming years. What HITL and HOOTL actually mean How healthcare is applying these frameworks Why governance is the missing layer Where humans must remain as the final authority Chris then sits down with Carrie Liken, CEO and founder of Sotto Strategies and a leading voice in healthcare search and AI driven consumer behavior. She offers a grounded perspective on how agentic AI, new browsing models, and health system data strategy are reshaping digital engagement.  Mentions From the Show:  Carrie Liken on LinkedIn Carrie Liken on SubStack Reed Smith on LinkedIn Chris Boyer on LinkedIn Chris Boyer website Chris Boyer on BlueSky Reed Smith on BlueSky Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

It would not be Thanksgiving without a little tradition. Each year we pull together the three Touch Point interviews that listeners came back to again and again. Think of it as a sampler platter for the long weekend. No turkey, just the conversations that defined 2025 for healthcare marketers. This year's top downloads brought a mix of AI momentum, creative reinvention, and a fresh look at online reputation. In this episode, Chris and Reed revisit highlights from: TP428 – Dianne Hammons, WG Content on how custom LLMs and structured content workflows pushed healthcare teams into a new era of speed, consistency, and brand clarity. TP431 – Matt Cyr, Loop Agency discussing why AI became the creative sidekick of choice for lean teams. Matt explains how his work with Roper St. Francis Healthcare showed that creativity gets better when AI takes the busywork off the table. TP424 – Dean Browell - how provides a reality check on Google Reviews. Dean explains why their influence is fading and what signals matter more as patients change how they evaluate care. These three episodes tell the story of a year when everything felt in motion. Content evolved. Creative teams retooled. Reputation strategy shifted under our feet. And marketers adapted at a pace that would have seemed impossible a few years ago.  A perfect listen for your drive, your kitchen time, or your post dessert recovery. Thanks for spending another year with Touch Point. Mentions from the Show: Dianne Hammons on LinkedIn Matt Cyr on LinkedIn https://touchpoint.health/podcast/tp428-breaking-the-healthcare-content-mold-rethinking-risk-embracing-prompt-power/ Reed Smith on LinkedIn Chris Boyer on LinkedIn Chris Boyer website Chris Boyer on BlueSky Reed Smith on BlueSky Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Healthcare digital strategy is changing faster than most systems can keep up with. Privacy restrictions are tightening, AI is rewriting search, patients are shifting expectations, and many of the digital tactics health systems still rely on are quietly becoming obsolete. In this episode, hosts Chris Boyer and Reed Smith count down six digital habits the industry needs to retire. They explore why consumer behavior, AI-driven browsing, telehealth recalibration, and the rise of machine-readable content have fundamentally changed what “good digital” looks like in 2025. From outdated SEO assumptions to bloated maps and embeds to the myth of the “digital front door,” this episode challenges legacy thinking and separates modern strategy from comfortable habits. If your organization is still operating on models built for 2015, this countdown will help reset your digital roadmap for the next decade. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Recorded on-site at the 2025 HealthCare Internet Conference (HCIC) in Las Vegas, host Chris Boyer sat down with consulting experts Cynthia Newton, Therese Lockemy, and Christine Albert from Solutions Central to discuss the biggest trends shaping healthcare marketing and digital strategy today. Together, they explore how health systems are navigating rapid change—balancing technology innovation with real-world challenges of collaboration, governance, and growth. The conversation dives into: Why outside perspectives help organizations see beyond internal blind spots How cross-department collaboration unlocks smarter, faster decision-making The role of technology and partnerships in solving core business challenges Emerging conference themes and what they signal for healthcare marketing in 2025 Plus, the episode wraps up with a special Touch Point Hot Takes segment, where each guest shares their boldest predictions for the future of healthcare digital strategy. Mentions from the Show: Cynthia Newton on LinkedIn Therese Lockemy on LinkedIn Christine Albert on LinkedIn SolutionsCentral on LinkedIn Reed Smith on LinkedIn Chris Boyer on LinkedIn Chris Boyer website Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

AI is no longer just a search companion; it's becoming a digital negotiator. In this episode, hosts Chris Boyer and Reed Smith explore how agentic AI and new AI-driven browsers like Atlas and Comet are transforming the healthcare consumer experience.The discussion examines how these emerging tools are rewriting the rules of visibility, consent, and control - shifting healthcare from a web built for people to a web built for machines. As AI learns to summarize, recommend, and even schedule care, health systems must rethink what it means to be findable, trustworthy, and human in a machine-readable world.Key themes include: The rise of AI-native browsers and the collapse of traditional web traffic models Why “find a doctor” tools may soon give way to AI-to-AI scheduling The privacy and consent challenges of agentic AI scraping data and acting independently How healthcare organizations can redesign for trust, transparency, and machine comprehension What it means for brand voice and patient empathy when AI becomes the front door Mentions from the Show: Carrie Liken: The Google Checkmate: Has Atlas Sparked the End of the Internet as We Know It? John Munsell: How AI Browsers Harvest Information Without Your Consent Accenture: Technology Vision 2024: Human by design Deloite:. AI in health care: Balancing innovation, trust, and new regs Reed Smith on LinkedIn Chris Boyer on LinkedIn Chris Boyer website Chris Boyer on BlueSky Reed Smith on BlueSky Sources discussed include recent work by Carrie Liken and John Munsell, alongside insights from Accenture, Deloitte, and federal agencies guiding AI ethics and data use. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode, hosts Chris Boyer and Reed Smith explore what it takes to build a future-ready marketing organization that connects intelligence to impact. They break down why the next phase is about velocity—turning insight into action—rather than visibility alone, and how maturity depends on integration, governance, and access to data. Then, Priyama Barua of Merge joins the conversation to discuss findings from her latest marketing maturity research. She shares how high-performing health systems operationalize insights, the gaps holding teams back, and what the next three to five years could look like as marketing evolves from a campaign function to a growth ecosystem. Key themes: Why speed of learning and action will define the next era of digital marketing How unified data, AI, and governance reshape marketing's role in growth The CMO as ecosystem integrator across brand, access, and operations Practical steps to move from campaign cycles to continuous learning Mentions from the Show: Marketing in healthcare: Improving the consumer experience Accenture Technology Vision 2024: “Human by Design” Technologies Will Reinvent Industries and Redefine Leaders by Supercharging Productivity and Creativity PriyamaBarua.com Priyama Barua on LinkedIn Merge Marketing Maturity Study: Results and Analysis Reed Smith on LinkedIn Chris Boyer on LinkedIn Chris Boyer website Chris Boyer on BlueSky Reed Smith on BlueSky Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices