touch point podcast

For a small hospital, staying independent now comes with a technology bill. Federal survey data shows the hospitals least able to trade records with the rest of healthcare share one trait more than any other. They stand alone. Independent hospitals routinely send, receive, look up and use outside patient records at less than half the rate of hospitals inside a system. Geography matters less than a...

Somewhere right now, a survey is being answered by someone who does not exist. Sometimes that is fraud. Sometimes it is the product. Synthetic respondents, digital twins and AI personas all start from real human data. None of them is a real person answering your question today. The ideas themselves are old. Personas came out of software design in the late 1990s, and digital twins came out of engin...

The American Marketing Association took promotion out of its definition of marketing in 2008. Inside most health systems, marketing still means advertising. Part of the reason is simple: impressions and clicks are easy to count, and the rest of the job is not. That habit is about to cost patients. Adults covered through Medicaid expansion now have to document work, school or community service hour...

The first draft a new hire used to write badly, and learn from, now arrives finished. Healthcare marketing never had a residency. It had the entry-level job, and AI is absorbing that job one task at a time. Judgment in this field is tacit knowledge. It is knowing when a quote will land wrong with physicians, or when a headline will read as spin. It comes from repetition with feedback, and those re...

In March 2025, Gartner predicted that agentic AI would resolve 80 percent of common customer service problems on its own by 2029. This February, the same Gartner practice predicted that half the companies that cut service staff because of AI will hire people back into similar work by next year, under different job titles. Eleven months apart, same firm. Healthcare is buying the first forecast righ...

Healthcare marketing spent four years settling on one answer to the tracking problem. Get consent, log it and honor it. It rests on an assumption nobody checked, which is that a person is on the other side of the banner reading the question. Software answers that question now. AI browsers do the browsing for people, and when one meets a consent modal it clears the modal as an obstacle. The decisio...

Somewhere in every access center there is a drop-down menu. No answer. Left message. Refused. Not interested. Wrong number. The person choosing from it has the least context in the building and the most pressure on the clock, and the choice takes about four seconds. That code then leaves the work queue, enters a report and becomes the evidence for not spending on those patients again. Chris Boyer...

Healthcare marketing has had a caregiver persona for fifteen years. She was worried, researching options, wanting a second opinion. That was a fair description of the job in 2010. Today most family caregivers help with bathing, dressing and mobility, and many now handle injections, wound care, catheters and oxygen equipment at home. Eleven percent were trained for any of it. Chris Boyer and Reed S...

Pew Research Center published the first clean count of how much of the internet is now written with AI. Roughly one page in ten shows significant signs of it. Filter to pages published since ChatGPT launched and it climbs past a third. Chris Boyer and Reed Smith spend the first half of the episode on what that measurement actually captures. Pew names four markers that have climbed since 2023: em d...

When a channel gets regulated, the money does not disappear. It moves. And it has been moving a while now: pharma investment in out of home advertising rose more than sixfold between 2016 and 2024, according to OAAA figures shared with Fierce Pharma. The FDA is rewriting the rules on broadcast drug ads and has told drug sponsors that deceptive advertising has become the norm on social platforms. B...

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 neit...

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 heal...

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...

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...

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...

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...