touch point podcast

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 provid...

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...

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 re...

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...

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. Appl...

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 mode...

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 th...

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...

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...

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 system...

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 hea...

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 indu...

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 t...

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 sur...

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 did...

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...

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 shi...

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 rela...

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...

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 conversi...

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 man...

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, reputat...

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, or...

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...

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 expecta...