touch point podcast

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...

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...

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,...

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. T...

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...

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 dig...

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 E...

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 a...

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...

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 c...

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 wit...