Podcast
touch point podcast
Hosted by touch point media · EN
touch point is a podcast dedicated to discussions on digital marketing and online patient engagement strategies for hospitals, health systems, and physicians' practices. In each episode, hosts Reed Smith and Chris Boyer dive deep into a variety of topics on the digital tools, solutions, strategies, and processes that are impacting the healthcare industry today.
31episodes
Episodes
Newest firstAll episodes
TP486: Live from HMPS26 — Trust at Scale, and the Marketing Value Problem Underneath It
1w ago00:49:53Tap to summarize60% 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
Transcribe →
TP485: Digital Equity Is Health Equity
2w ago00:35:19Tap to summarizeIn 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
Transcribe →
TP484: The Channels the Model Can't See
3w ago01:00:38Tap to summarize91% 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
Transcribe →
TP483: The Market That Competition Forgot
4w ago00:37:00Tap to summarizeOf 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
Transcribe →
TP482 Episode Outline: The Pilot That Never Graduates
Apr 800:37:09Tap to summarizeHealthcare 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
Transcribe →
TP481: Data Accuracy Is a Brand Decision
Apr 101:04:23Tap to summarizeHealth 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
Transcribe →
TP480: The Brief Only Has One User
Mar 2500:53:45Tap to summarizeUser-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
Transcribe →
TP479: Agile in a Waterfall World (or Don’t Go Chasing Waterfalls)
Mar 1800:37:51Tap to summarizeRunning 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
Transcribe →
TP478: The Journey Nobody Told Operations About
Mar 1100:41:58Tap to summarizeThe 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
Transcribe →
TP477: The Trust Debt: The Hidden Cost of Automating the Wrong Things
Mar 400:37:36Tap to summarizeAutomation 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
Transcribe →