Melissa Gilkes-Smith

TouchPoints: Moments that Matter in Healthcare

Business EN ↓ 6 episodes

TouchPoints: Moments that Matter in Healthcare explores the critical moments in the patient journey where leadership, operations, and experience intersect. Hosted by Melissa Gilkes-Smith , patient experience consultant and Founder of Healthcare Management Consulting Group, the podcast features practical insights and conversations with healthcare leaders about improving patient experience, strengthening healthcare operations, and building cultures of care. Each episode examines real healthcare touchpoints, from scheduling and patient access to communication, leadership, and service recovery, of...

Author

Melissa Gilkes-Smith

Episodes

The Referral Relationship: How Physician Liaison Work Shapes the Patient Journey Before It Begins 06.07.2026 35:46

Send us Fan Mail A physician referral is more than a name passed from one office to another. It is an act of trust. In this episode of TouchPoints: Moments that Matter in Healthcare , Melissa Gilkes-Smith sits down with Shayda Amaya, a healthcare business development leader with more than 20 years of experience across the healthcare continuum, to explore how physician liaison work shapes the patie...

Leadership by Walking Around:How Being Seen and Available Changes Everything 22.06.2026 38:04

Send us Fan Mail Culture is not what you post on the wall. It is what leadership does when no one is watching, and everything changes when they start walking the floor. In this episode of TouchPoints: Moments that Matter, host Melissa Gilkes-Smith explores one of the most powerful and most underutilized tools in healthcare leadership: Management by Walking Around. Not as a management trend from a...

The Irreplaceable Provider:How Clinician Communication Defines the Patient Experience 15.06.2026 45:28

Send us Fan Mail The patient is in the room. The provider walks in. And what happens next will define more of the patient’s felt experience than almost anything else in the entire care journey. In this episode of TouchPoints: Moments that Matter, host Melissa Gilkes-Smith arrives at Pillar Five of the Nine Pillars of Patient Experience Framework: the Clinical Encounter. Everything that came before...

Culture Doesn’t Eat Strategy. It Digests It. 09.06.2026 45:13

Send us Fan Mail Everyone in healthcare has heard it: “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” It gets nodded at in boardrooms, printed on culture decks, and repeated until it stops meaning anything. But what if that framing is not just incomplete, it’s actually misleading? In this episode of TouchPoints: Moments that Matter, host Melissa Gilkes-Smith sits down with patient experience expert and coa...

Why I Started Paying Attention to the Touchpoints 01.06.2026 16:16

Send us Fan Mail TouchPoints — Episode 1: Why I Started Paying Attention to the Touchpoints What if "great clinical care" and "a great patient experience" aren't the same thing, and almost nobody is running the second one on purpose? In this opening episode of TouchPoints, healthcare operations consultant Melissa Gilkes-Smith introduces the worldview behind the show and wa...

Welcome to TouchPoints: Where Every Moment in Healthcare Matters 14.05.2026 1:00

Send us Fan Mail Welcome to TouchPoints: Moments That Matter in Healthcare, the podcast for leaders, clinicians, and early careerists who believe that how we deliver care matters as much as the care itself. Each episode, we'll explore the people, practices, and principles that shape exceptional patient experiences. You'll hear conversations grounded in the Nine Pillars of Patient Experie...