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Aug 2026

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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.

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September 9, 202659 min

TP504 - The Disposition Code

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 and Reed Smith open episode 504 by pulling apart two things health systems routinely treat as one. Capacity utilization measures whether you sold the inventory. It says nothing about who could not get in. Reed puts the distinction plainly. Capacity is the view from the provider's side of the desk and access is the view from the patient's. Marrying the two is the work. Then the evidence. A cluster randomized trial across 44 primary care practices and roughly 12,000 patients found that electronic health record reminders alone moved nothing at all. Completion of overdue follow-up ran 22.7% with reminders against 22.9% for usual care. Adding a letter and a phone call took it to 31%. Ordinary contact, twice, with no technology in it. Chris keeps the ceiling in front of the audience for the rest of the episode, because even in the strongest arm roughly two thirds of patients still did not complete. The second segment asks what a person is actually for. Medicare answered part of this in 2024 when it started paying for patient navigation, and the answer it gave is clinical severity, with a cancer diagnosis qualifying automatically. Patients owe 20% of the cost, which is one of the reasons practices report they have not started using the codes. Chris and Reed then sit with the finding that argues against them. In that same trial, adding a navigator on top of the letter and the phone call moved the number four tenths of one point. They work through what that does and does not prove, and land on three jobs a person can do that a letter cannot. Only one of them changes the system instead of recovering a patient, and it is the one nobody puts in a financial model. Jessica Walker of Care Sherpa closes the episode with the case. A health system handed her a list of oncology screening patients its access team had marked unreachable after the auto-dialer sequence ran out. What she found in that list was almost never disinterest. Wrong orders, wrong referring physician, wrong location. Phone numbers and addresses that no longer worked. Carrier blocking. Patients in hospice, deceased or no longer eligible while the order sat and expired. Patients who would have had to cross a river. Her description of it is that the health system was asking people to pick up a part-time job to fix their own referral. The most useful moment comes later. Her team heard the same thing from more than one patient, that the nearest location's hours did not work for a shift worker. The system added Wednesday evenings and recovered those patients. She also describes a referring physician who had quietly stopped sending patients because his patients were never getting their screenings done, and what it took to turn that back on. If you cannot say what your people do that a letter cannot, you have bought a service tier rather than an answer. Healthcare's Long Walk Toward the Patient, the free eBook marking 500 episodes: https://www.touchpointpodcastbook.com Atlas SJ, Tosteson ANA, Burdick TE, et al. A Multilevel Primary Care Intervention to Improve Follow-Up of Overdue Abnormal Cancer Screening Test Results: A Cluster Randomized Clinical Trial. JAMA. 2023;330(14):1348-1358. 44 practices, 11,980 patients: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2810508 Atlas SJ, Tosteson ANA, Burdick TE, et al. Primary Care Practitioner Perceptions on the Follow-up of Abnormal Cancer Screening Test Results. JAMA Netw Open. 2022;5(9):e2234194. Survey of 275 primary care practitioners across three health systems: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2796828 CMS, Health Equity Services in the 2024 Physician Fee Schedule Final Rule. Principal Illness Navigation codes G0023 and G0024, plus the peer support codes, effective January 1 2024: https://www.cms.gov/files/document/mln9201074-health-equity-services-2024-physician-fee-schedule-final-rule.pdf-0 Pratt-Chapman ML. Navigation Refresh: Updates to Principal Illness Navigation Billing. Journal of Oncology Navigation & Survivorship. May 2026;17(3). Source for the 20% patient coinsurance as a reported barrier to adoption: https://www.jons-online.com/issues/2026/may-2026-vol-17-no-3/navigation-refresh-updates-to-principal-illness-navigation-billing Care Sherpa: https://caresherpa.com Jessica Walker on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jessicawalkercaresherpa/ Eternal, the longevity startup founded by Alex Mather of The Athletic, which now generates a weekly AI audio recap of a user's own lab and wearable data. Fast Company, June 9 2026: https://www.fastcompany.com/91555441/eternal-startup-turns-health-data-into-ai-generated-podcasts TP488, "If Marketing Owned Patient Activation," referenced in segment one on marketing capturing demand and access dispositioning it TP482, "The Pilot That Never Graduates," referenced by Chris inside the interview when he asks Jessica how she broke out of perpetual pilot status The TPS Report newsletter, at touchpoint.health 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 Recommendations from this episode: Chris: Earth, Wind & Fire (To Be Celestial vs. That's the Weight of the World), the Questlove documentary on HBO and HBO Max. Premiered at Tribeca June 3 2026 and released June 7 2026. 119 minutes. Covers Maurice White's jazz background and his plan for the band before it was a band: https://www.hbo.com/ Reed: the ETENWOLF P300 electric ball pump. Rechargeable, preset modes for basketball, football and soccer, custom PSI setting, inflates and deflates, ships with two needles and a pouch: https://etenwolf.com/collections/electric-ball-pump MENTIONS FROM THE SHOW Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

September 2, 20261 hr 4 min

TP503 - The Person Who Wasn't Part of the Plan

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 Smith open on new research projecting how much bigger this population gets by 2040, and on why the explanation everyone reaches for turns out to be wrong. The rest of the first half is about why none of this reaches anyone's numbers. One caregiver arrives in a health system as three unlinked records. The one tool built to let her in goes unmarketed and almost unused, and the workaround hospital staff recommend instead would get a marketer fired. Then Chris turns to why every fix built for her quietly stops working around week three. Jessica Hulter and Lamarque Polvado of CareStarter built software that asked a clinic checkout desk for sixty seconds. Staff used it for two weeks, then stopped, and nobody could make them start again. What they did in response put the human somewhere other than where healthcare usually puts her, and Jessica is that human. If your organization has a caregiver persona, go find out what year the data underneath it came from. Healthcare's Long Walk Toward the Patient, the free eBook marking 500 episodes: https://www.touchpointpodcastbook.com The Future Availability of Family Caregivers: Implications for Late-Life Care Gaps, Population Research and Policy Review, volume 45, article 33, published online June 1 2026. Pairs the National Health and Aging Trends Study with kinship projections through 2040: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11113-026-10016-4 AARP Public Policy Institute, The Aging of the Baby Boom and the Growing Care Gap, 2013. Source of the caregiver support ratio, 6.6 in 1990, 7.2 in 2010, projected near 4 by 2030: https://www.aarp.org/content/dam/aarp/research/public_policy_institute/ltc/2013/baby-boom-and-the-growing-care-gap-insight-AARP-ppi-ltc.pdf AARP and the National Alliance for Caregiving, Caregiving in the US 2025. Fielded in 2024, published July 2025, 6,858 family caregivers on a nationally representative online survey: https://www.caregivingintheus.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/caregiving-in-us-2025.doi_.10.26419-2fppi.00373.001.pdf Security and Privacy Risks Associated With Adult Patient Portal Accounts in US Hospitals, JAMA Network Open, 2020. Survey of 102 US hospitals on proxy account availability: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32364562/ Administrative burden as an organizational design problem, narrative review, The Healthcare Executive, August 2026. Source of the argument that burden work moves rather than disappears: https://www.thehealthcareexecutive.net/article/operations-quality-safety/administrative-burden-workflow-redesign-hospitals/ CareStarter: https://carestarter.co PIC6, the innovation unit: https://pic6.co PCSI, whose mission is to enhance the lives of people with disabilities: https://www.pcsi.org Jessica Hulter on LinkedIn, where she invited listeners to reach out directly: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jessica-hulter/ AFWERX, the Air Force innovation arm whose SBIR program funded the Travis Air Force Base work: https://afwerx.com/ Exceptional Family Member Program, Military OneSource overview: https://www.militaryonesource.mil/family-relationships/special-needs/exceptional-family-member-program/ GAO-18-348, DoD Should Improve Its Oversight of the Exceptional Family Member Program, May 2018: https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-18-348 Montclair Police Department cargo theft investigation, two pickups about an hour apart on August 17 at the Anheuser-Busch distribution center on Brooks Street in Montclair California, roughly $70,000 in product including about 40,000 pounds of Pabst Blue Ribbon. Pabst posted a reward and a return deadline on Instagram: https://ktla.com/news/california/40000-pounds-of-pabst-blue-ribbon-stolen-in-massive-california-beer-heist/ TP499, "The Experience Ends Where the Bill Begins," the Cassandra Skinner episode Chris calls back to on what looks like noncompliance TP482, "The Pilot That Never Graduates," the episode Chris calls back to on initiatives that never survive past the trial 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 Recommendations from this episode: Chris: Ted Lasso season four on Apple TV+. Ten episodes, premiered August 5 2026 with new episodes weekly on Wednesdays through October 7. Jason Sudeikis, Hannah Waddingham, Juno Temple, Brett Goldstein and Brendan Hunt return, with Ted taking over AFC Richmond's second division women's team Reed: College football, and SEC Shorts, the weekly comedy sketch series on YouTube and Instagram that plays off the prior weekend's SEC results: https://www.youtube.com/@SECShorts MENTIONS FROM THE SHOW Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

August 26, 20261 hr 4 min

TP502 - Don't Write Toward the Machine

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 dashes, Oxford commas, a vocabulary that includes delve, testament, tapestry and enhance, and the construction where a sentence tells you a thing is not just one thing but another. Chris walks through the tells Pew did not count, which turn out to be the more useful ones for anybody responsible for a website. The paragraph that ends by restating itself. Every paragraph running the same length. Content so generic it could belong to any health system in the country, because the model has no lived experience to draw on and never will. Reed pushes back in the direction the argument needs. Patients have been navigating vague human-written hospital pages for fifteen years. The model did not invent that problem. It removed the barrier holding the volume down, the way digital cameras ended the discipline of thirty-six exposures. Chris names where that leads: everything converging toward the middle, because averaging is how the models were built. The second half is for people who own content. Google Search Central says generative AI is useful for research and for adding structure to original content, and that using it to generate many pages without adding value may violate the scaled content abuse policy. Google publishes no threshold. No word count, no acceptable percentage, no safe number of pages. Chris and Reed get specific about where AI earns its place in content production and where it costs more than it saves, then land on the trap waiting at the end of it, which is teams running detection scores and editing toward a machine instead of toward a patient. Lacey Reichwald of AHA Media Group closes the episode with the finding that reframes the conversation. Content creation is the most popular use of AI in marketing departments and it is not where the efficiency lives. She has surveyed health system marketing teams for years, and her argument is that organizations keep backing a process into a tool rather than choosing a tool for a process. She also makes the case for putting the AI skeptics on the working group on purpose. If your content team is measured on pages published, you have already told them which of these two halves matters. Healthcare's Long Walk Toward the Patient, the free eBook marking 500 episodes: https://www.touchpointpodcastbook.com Pew Research Center, How Much of the Internet Is Written With AI?, August 20 2026. Roughly 490,000 English-language pages from Common Crawl going back to 2021, scored with Open Pangram: https://www.pewresearch.org/data-labs/2026/08/20/how-much-of-the-internet-is-written-with-ai/ Google Search Central, Guidance on generative AI content, including the scaled content abuse spam policy introduced in the March 2024 spam update: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/fundamentals/using-gen-ai-content Google Search Central, Spam policies for Google web search, scaled content abuse definition: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/essentials/spam-policies Open Pangram, the open-weight detection model Pew used, from Pangram Labs: https://www.pangram.com/ LinkedIn "Seems like AI slop" reporting button, launched end of July 2026. Chief Product Officer Hari Srinivasan reported more than one million uses in the first weeks and roughly 40 percent fewer views on flagged posts: https://techcrunch.com/2026/07/30/linkedin-adds-a-button-to-report-ai-generated-slop/ Social Media Today, LinkedIn says 1M people have reported AI slop, August 20 2026: https://www.socialmediatoday.com/news/linkedin-says-1m-people-have-reported-ai-slop/828465/ Harvard Business Review, AI-Generated "Workslop" Is Destroying Productivity, September 2025. BetterUp Labs with the Stanford Social Media Lab, 1,150 full-time US desk workers. BetterUp is a commercial platform and the figures are self-reported: https://hbr.org/2025/09/ai-generated-workslop-is-destroying-productivity Harvard Business Review, June 2026 follow-on from Matthias Holweg and Thomas Davenport extending the argument into organizational knowledge decay AHA Media Group: https://ahamediagroup.com/ Lacey Reichwald on LinkedIn, where she publishes her tool tip newsletter: https://www.linkedin.com/in/laceyreichwald/ TP500, "Healthcare's Long Walk Toward the Patient," where the hosts describe AI drafts of the book getting smoother and less true at the same time 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 Recommendations from this episode: Chris: Effin' Birds, the daily comic by Aaron Reynolds pairing Audubon-style bird illustrations with profane captions, plus the merchandise and playing card decks. Not family friendly: https://effinbirds.com/ Reed: Reacher, season four, on Prime Video. Eight episodes, premiered August 12 2026 with the first three, new episodes weekly on Wednesdays through September 16 MENTIONS FROM THE SHOW Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

August 19, 202635 min

TP501 - The Channel Regulators Aren't Watching

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. Billboards, meanwhile, are being sold to healthcare marketers as stable, trusted and brand safe. Chris Boyer and Reed Smith spend this episode on the question hiding inside that pitch. Is out of home actually safe, or is it just unexamined? Those are not the same thing, and only one of them lasts. What most marketing teams have not caught up to is what happened to the channel itself while nobody was watching it. A billboard can now be selected based on the health profile of the few blocks around it, using disease prevalence data mapped to inventory at a precision that would trigger a privacy review in any other channel your team buys. Reed calls it a data story wearing a billboard costume. Once you hear it that way, the brand safe framing starts to sound less like a description and more like a countdown. Then the conversation goes back to 1971, when cigarette ads were pushed off television and radio. The tobacco industry did not cut its budget. It relocated, immediately and measurably, into magazines and event sponsorship. Regulation eventually followed the money into those channels too, but the gap between the money arriving and the rules arriving was long enough to build an entire era of marketing on top of. Chris and Reed work out how long that gap might run this time. They do not land in the same place. The last stretch is for health system marketers specifically, who carry none of pharma's drug claims exposure and every temptation to copy pharma's response anyway. Chris and Reed close on concrete actions worth taking this quarter, starting with a question almost nobody has asked their media buyer, and a category of community partnership that does not look like advertising at all until you check what sits behind it. If your out of home campaigns skip the review your search and social campaigns already get, ask whether that is a judgment about the data or only about the format. Mentions from the Show: Healthcare's Long Walk Toward the Patient, the free eBook marking 500 episodes: https://www.touchpointpodcastbook.com Fierce Pharma, 2026 forecast on pharma ad dollars shifting away from traditional TV, citing OAAA data on the sixfold rise in pharma OOH investment 2016 to 2024. OAAA is the OOH industry trade association: https://www.fiercepharma.com/marketing/2026-forecast-pharma-ad-dollars-will-continue-shifting-away-traditional-tv FDA, Launches Crackdown on Deceptive Drug Advertising, September 9 2025: https://www.fda.gov/news-events/press-announcements/fda-launches-crackdown-deceptive-drug-advertising OptimizeRx and Lamar Advertising partnership announcement, ZIP+4 mapping against Micro-Neighborhood Targeting disease prevalence data, September 9 2025. Vendor announcement, labeled as such: https://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2025/09/09/3147336/0/en/OptimizeRx-Partners-with-Lamar-Advertising-to-Reach-Clinically-Relevant-Audiences-Through-Out-of-Home-Healthcare-Advertising.html Warner KE, Goldenhar LM, The cigarette advertising broadcast ban and magazine coverage of smoking and health, Journal of Public Health Policy, 1989: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/2715337/ Trends in Cigarette Marketing Expenditures 1975 to 2019, analysis of FTC Cigarette Reports, covering the post-1971 shift into unrestricted channels and the 1998 Master Settlement Agreement billboard and transit prohibition: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9048889/ World Out of Home Organization, Global Out of Home Expenditure Report 2026: https://www.worldooh.org/news/woo-global-ooh-expenditure-report-2026 OAAA, Out of Home Advertising Revenue Reaches Record $9.46 Billion, March 2026. Industry trade association: https://oaaa.org/news/out-of-home-advertising-revenue-reaches-record-9-46-billion/ Edelman Trust Barometer: https://www.edelman.com/trust/2026/trust-barometer TP472, "Reputation as a Signal, Not a Score," on declining institutional trust in healthcare TP429, "Are We Wasting Our Digital Media Spend?" on where healthcare media dollars actually go 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 Recommendations from this episode: Chris: MuscleKit aluminum wall mounted anchor fitness system, 300 pound capacity, around $150 Reed: Nicpro 1.3mm mechanical pencil set, three pencils with black, red and yellow lead Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

August 12, 202642 min

TP500 - Healthcare’s Long Walk to the Patient

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 neither host could hold in their head. Then it started deciding what any of it meant, and the drafts got smoother and less true at the same time. Chris describes it as walking toward the edge of a cliff, where the view keeps improving right up until it doesn't. The rest of the episode is self-scoring. Some calls held up. A guest argued in 2018 that the value of telemedicine sat in asynchronous messaging rather than the video visit, five years before the industry agreed. Another said your website was no longer your website, and has been repeating it almost yearly since. Being right early turned out not to change anything, which is a harder finding than being wrong. And they were wrong in places they name out loud, including a tracking pixel they treated as an optimization question years before it became one of the largest privacy failures in healthcare marketing. In this episode: Where AI genuinely accelerated nine years of archive work, and the exact point it stopped being useful Why the cliff metaphor describes an organizational risk and not just a writing problem Three calls the show got right early, and why early was not the same as useful The consumerism frame that described a market most of the country does not live in What it means that the front door moved onto property health systems do not own The access admission, said plainly, and what it costs to say it If the right people heard the argument and agreed with it and nothing moved, then knowing was never the thing standing in the way. Healthcare's Long Walk Toward the Patient is free. Ten chapters, 26 guests. Mentions from the Show: Healthcare's Long Walk Toward the Patient, the free eBook, Touch Point Media, August 2026: https://www.touchpointpodcastbook.com/?utm_source=touchpoint&utm_medium=shownotes&utm_campaign=tp500 TP55, "Pixels and Vertical Videos: Is Facebook Forcing Us to Advertise Correctly?" February 2018: https://touchpoint.health/podcast/tp55-pixels-vertical-videos-facebook-forcing-us-advertise-correctly/  TP73, "Deep Learning in Healthcare" with Abhi Sharma, June 2018: https://touchpoint.health/podcast/tp73-deep-learning-in-healthcare/  TP80, "A Telemedicine Tell-All" with Dr. Justin Smith, August 2018: https://touchpoint.health/podcast/tp80-a-telemedicine-tell-all/  TP115, "Your Website Isn't Your Website Anymore" with Carrie Liken, April 2019: https://touchpoint.health/podcast/tp115-your-website-isnt-your-website-anymore/  TP342, "When Does 'Patient Access' Actually Begin?": https://touchpoint.health/podcast/tp342-when-does-patient-access-actually-begin/  TP483, on hospital market competition, drawing on Health Care Cost Institute data: https://touchpoint.health/podcast/tp483-the-market-that-competition-forgot/  TP488, on marketing and patient activation, drawing on the Forum for Healthcare Strategists and Digital Health Strategies CMO survey: https://touchpoint.health/podcast/tp488-what-if-marketing-owned-patient-activation/  TP493, "Ghost Networks and the Reflex to Automate" with Chris Hemphill and Heather Nairn: https://touchpoint.health/podcast/tp493-ghost-networks-and-the-reflex-to-automate/  Health Care Cost Institute, Health Cost Landscape, April 2026: https://healthcostinstitute.org/all-hcci-reports/what-is-the-health-cost-landscape/ AJMC on the HCCI Healthy Marketplace Index: https://www.ajmc.com/view/nearly-75-of-us-hospital-markets-highly-concentrated-hcci-report-shows 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

August 5, 202657 min

TP499 - The Experience Ends When the Bill Begins

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 health systems, brand standards govern the digital experience, website, campaigns, and the call center. But the statement, the denial letter and the financial assistance page are managed separately. They also discuss the requirements to reach the people in the community most likely to need financial help but describe how these efforts read like a marketing campaign, but marketing never got this memo.  Then Cassandra Skinner from Xsolis makes the case for collecting correctly rather than collecting less, arguing that compassion and accountability were never opposites. She also describes how patient advocacy acts as quiet work that lives in questioning one authorization or catching one coordination of benefits error. On automation she draws the line at can versus should. And she lands somewhere worth sitting with, that patients do not lose trust because a machine was involved, they lose trust when nobody will own the decision. Why the instrument that defines patient experience has no question about cost, and what that does to budgets and attention What marketing gave up when the billing statement became somebody else's document The financial assistance requirements already written into federal law, and why satisfying them has not made patients aware Why a decade of mandated price disclosure produced more published data and not more patient understanding What revenue cycle sees about a patient that marketing never does Where accountability has to sit when part of the decision is automated If your health system's financial assistance page would fail the standard you apply to any campaign you would sign your name to, you just found work that has been yours the whole time. Mentions from the Show: IRS, Financial Assistance Policy and Emergency Medical Care Policy, Section 501(r)(4): https://www.irs.gov/charities-non-profits/financial-assistance-policy-and-emergency-medical-care-policy-section-501r4 AHRQ, CAHPS Adult Hospital Survey (11 measures effective January 1, 2025): https://www.ahrq.gov/cahps/surveys-guidance/hospital/about/adult_hp_survey.html CMS, HCAHPS Patients' Perspectives of Care Survey (administered 48 hours to six weeks after discharge): https://www.cms.gov/medicare/quality/initiatives/hospital-quality-initiative/hcahps-patients-perspectives-care-survey KFF, Americans' Challenges with Health Care Costs, updated April 2026 (about half of adults could not pay an unexpected $500 medical bill): https://www.kff.org/health-costs/americans-challenges-with-health-care-costs/ KFF Health Care Debt Survey (41% with health care debt, 51% of those with debt skipped recommended care): https://www.kff.org/health-costs/kff-health-care-debt-survey/ KFF, Hospital Charity Care, How It Works and Why It Matters: https://www.kff.org/health-costs/issue-brief/hospital-charity-care-how-it-works-and-why-it-matters/ Dollar For, Fixing Hospital Financial Assistance Programs (52% never informed, 65% unaware it existed). Patient advocacy nonprofit, labeled as such on air: https://dollarfor.org/fixing-hospital-finaid/ AHA, Hospital Price Transparency, Current Landscape and a Better Path Forward, June 5 2026: https://www.aha.org/fact-sheets/2026-06-05-fact-sheet-hospital-price-transparency-current-landscape-and-better-path-forward AHA, Improving the Patient Billing Experience issue brief, October 2021: https://www.aha.org/system/files/media/file/2021/10/Improving-Patient-Billing-Experience_IB_Final_10-22-21.pdf CMS, CY 2026 OPPS and ASC Final Rule, Hospital Price Transparency Policy Changes: https://www.cms.gov/newsroom/fact-sheets/cy-2026-opps-ambulatory-surgical-center-final-rule-hospital-price-transparency-policy-changes HFMA, CMS's latest transparency rule aims to make price estimates more exact, November 2025 (named executive on the machine-readable file): https://www.hfma.org/price-transparency/cmss-latest-transparency-rule-aims-to-make-price-estimates-more-exact/ Ways and Means Committee, H.R. 9504 Tax Exempt Hospital Transparency Act reporting elements, July 2026: https://waysandmeans.house.gov/2026/07/20/what-they-are-saying-ways-and-means-committee-bringing-transparency-to-americas-nonprofit-hospital-sector/ Cassandra Skinner on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/cskinner-health/  XSOLIS website: https://www.xsolis.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 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

July 29, 20261 hr 8 min

TP498 - Nobody's Patient

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 Boyer and Reed Smith open with why that judgment is rational rather than unfair. Stanford's web credibility research asked more than 2,500 people what made a site believable and found design look led every other factor at 46.1% of comments, well ahead of accuracy of information at 14.3%. That research is from 2003 and the behavior has not moved. Meanwhile the audited quality data has been free and one search away for years, and it loses to the impression. Press Ganey's 2025 consumer work puts brand reputation at 86% of influence on choice. The uncomfortable conclusion is that the web experience is the first quality claim an organization makes, and it gets defended in budget meetings on cost per acquisition. The second segment follows the person for whom this goes badly. More than 30% of US adults lacked a usual source of care in 2022, the highest level in a decade, during a stretch of historically high insurance coverage. The federal government counts this. In the 2022 National Health Interview Survey, 21.7% of adults delayed or skipped care for a nonfinancial reason, and 10.6% because no appointment was available when they needed one. Nothing inside a health system counts any of it, because conversion, satisfaction scores and market share all describe people who finished something. Chris and Reed make the case that an abandoned search is the earliest visible moment of someone falling out of care, and that it sits in a marketing tool nobody has assigned an owner. Then Sondra Brown of MDRG and Chris Pace of SearchStax bring the research they ran on the digital front door. They walk through the collapse in whether people believe hospitals put care ahead of profits, why sites built against the org chart cannot serve a patient journey, and a verbatim from the qualitative work about what a dated website tells a patient about the medicine behind it. Chris takes on the argument that the website is dead in an AI-first world and explains why first-party content became more load-bearing rather than less. And they land on the number this whole episode circles, what happens to people who cannot find a new primary care doctor online. A quarter of them stop looking altogether. Mentions from the Show: SearchStax and MDRG, The State of Enterprise Site Search, 2026.https://www.searchstax.com/white-papers/the-state-of-enterprise-site-search/  Milbank Memorial Fund and The Physicians Foundation with the Robert Graham Center, The Health of US Primary Care: 2025 Scorecard:  https://www.milbank.org/publications/the-health-of-us-primary-care-2025-scorecard-report-the-cost-of-neglect/ NCHS, Sociodemographic Differences in Nonfinancial Access Barriers to Health Care Among Adults: United States, 2022, National Health Statistics Reports no. 207, August 2024 (21.7% reporting at least one nonfinancial barrier, 10.6% unable to find an available appointment): https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nhsr/nhsr207.pdf Fogg BJ, Soohoo C, Danielson D, Marable L, Stanford J, Tauber E, How Do Users Evaluate the Credibility of Web Sites? Stanford Persuasive Technology Lab, DUX 2003 (design look 46.1% of credibility comments, 41.8% for health sites): https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/997078.997097 AMN Healthcare, 2025 Survey of Physician Appointment Wait Times (31-day average for a new patient appointment, up 19% since 2022). AMN is a physician staffing firm, disclosed on air: https://www.amnhealthcare.com/siteassets/amn-insights/physician/ps-2025-physician-appt-wait-times---wp-v6.pdf Press Ganey, Healthcare Consumer Experience 2025 (86% citing brand reputation, 49% willing to wait up to three weeks for a primary care appointment). Industry-published, disclosed on air: https://www.pressganey.com/news/press-ganey-report-reveals-the-trust-factors-reshaping-how-consumers-make-healthcare-decisions/ Sondra Brown on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sondra-brown-360a999/ Chris Pace on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chrispaceaz/ Chris Pace's Substack: https://chriscellaneous.substack.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

July 22, 202657 min

TP497 - We've Seen This Before (and That's the Problem)

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 at all about AI. Chris Boyer and Reed Smith open with why the reflex is so strong. The 1999 objections to the web read almost word for word like the 2024 objections to AI. Patients won't trust it. It makes mistakes. It can't replace the clinician. Pew found 60% of US adults uncomfortable with a provider relying on AI for their own care, which rhymes with the discomfort that greeted the web. There is even a formal model for the pattern, the Gartner Hype Cycle, though its own critics point out the curve has no data behind it. In the second segment they find where the analogy breaks. The web reached a majority of adults over roughly a decade. ChatGPT reached 100 million users in about two months, the fastest ramp UBS had seen in twenty years. The web moved information you could still judge by its source. A large language model makes the answer in the moment, with no source to check, in the same confident tone whether it's right or wrong. Chris and Reed hand you one question to run in a meeting, does the thing that made the old case turn out fine actually show up here, and one way to sort your AI uses by how much a wrong answer costs. Then the conversation turns to two people who have hosted the room where healthcare argues about this since 1996. Kathy Divis and Mike Schneider of Greystone.Net mark the 30th anniversary of HCIC. They trace digital from a small side function to something so central that a keynote once argued digital marketing was dead, meaning it had stopped needing its own name. Mike makes the point plainly, the technology changes and the questions stay the same, from the internet to CRM to AI. And they share what surfaced across this year's conference proposals, a return to trust and authority as the theme running through the whole organization. In this episode, Chris, Reed and the guests cover: Why we've seen this before is both earned pattern recognition and a way to stop thinking Where the AI story tracks the internet and where it breaks, on speed and on the difference between moving information and making it The one question that separates a real analogy from a comforting one How 30 years of HCIC read the same skepticism across the internet, CRM and AI What it means when a technology stops needing its own name, and why invisible was the goal for the web and the risk for AI Why trust and authority came back as the theme in this year's proposals If someone in your next meeting says we've seen this before, this episode is about the follow-up question that tells you whether they just said something wise or talked the room out of thinking. touchpoint.health Mentions from the Show: Pew Research Center, The Social Life of Health Information, 2009 (25% of adults online for health info in 2000, 61% by 2009): https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2009/06/11/the-social-life-of-health-information/ Pew Research Center, 60% of Americans Would Be Uncomfortable With a Provider Relying on AI in Their Own Health Care, 2023: https://www.pewresearch.org/science/2023/02/22/60-of-americans-would-be-uncomfortable-with-provider-relying-on-ai-in-their-own-health-care/ Gartner, Hype Cycle Research Methodology: https://www.gartner.com/en/research/methodologies/gartner-hype-cycle Reuters, ChatGPT sets record for fastest-growing user base, 2023 (100M users in about two months): https://finance.yahoo.com/news/1-chatgpt-sets-record-fastest-051929384.html BMJ Open, 2026 chatbot health-information audit (nearly half of answers problematic). CONFIRM primary link and figures before publish. Medical Hallucination in Foundation Models, medRxiv, 2025 (overconfidence and poor calibration): https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.02.28.25323115v1.full HCIC (Healthcare Interactive Conference), 30th anniversary, produced by Greystone: https://www.hcic.net/ Live  Kathy Divis, president, Greystone. https://www.linkedin.com/in/kathyldivis/   Mike Schneider, Greystone. https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelschneider-greystone/  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

July 15, 202641 min

TP496 - The Loop Was Never Built to be Closed

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 is the one about the people who never responded at all. Roughly half of them said nobody asked. Only about ten percent said they figured it would not matter. The industry has been building campaigns to re-engage patients it never invited. Chris and Reed then push past the vendor data into the instrument the whole industry runs on. HCAHPS launched in 2006 as a standardized public accountability measure, and it does that job. It is also a payment mechanism. A quarter of a hospital's value-based purchasing score comes from it, and CMS withholds two percent of base operating DRG payments into the pool it feeds. When the score moves money, the organization manages the score. Saving one upset patient earns nothing on that scoreboard. Reed draws the line between a rating and a review, then finds the hole underneath both. A system can act on feedback, fix the process for the next patient, and the person who raised it never learns a thing. Healthcare is not built to be visible about its own quality improvement. He also names the unglamorous version of the problem, the intake screen where somebody keys in a fake phone number to advance to the next field, which quietly guarantees nobody can ever reach that patient again. In this episode, Chris and Reed cover: Why the silence after a bad experience is an invitation problem, not an apathy problem The 22-point gap between patients who feel acknowledged and patients who see action How a survey tied to reimbursement ends up managing a score instead of a relationship What Schwab and Apple settled fifteen years ago that healthcare still argues about Why a real-time feedback tool on a short-staffed unit can make things worse Feedback as an early safety signal, and why marketing usually owns the platform it arrives on Acknowledgment is not action. If the only thing that ever comes back to a patient is thanks for your feedback, you closed the ticket and left the loop open. Mentions from the Show: Alchemer, 2026 Healthcare Experience Report (vendor study, disclosed on air): https://www.alchemer.com/resources/e-guide/2026-healthcare-experience-report/ Penn LDI, Surveys of Hospital Patients Evolve to Use Email, Phone and Mail, 2025 (HCAHPS response rates, survey timing): https://ldi.upenn.edu/our-work/research-updates/surveys-of-hospital-patients-evolve-to-use-email-phone-and-mail-and-even-narratives/ Susan Edgman-Levitan, AHRQ CAHPS principal investigator, on response bias, 2025: https://www.patientguidesolutions.com/beyond-the-new-hcahps CMS Hospital Value-Based Purchasing, HCAHPS weighting and the 2% DRG withhold: https://www.cms.gov/medicare/quality/value-based-programs/hospital-value-based-purchasing Becker's Hospital Review, A New HCAHPS Survey for a New Year (Rick Evans, NewYork-Presbyterian e-survey pilot), 2024: https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/patient-experience/a-new-hcahps-survey-for-a-new-year/ The Beryl Institute, Closing the Loop: Using Real-Time Feedback to Improve Patient Experience (Providence Holy Cross): https://theberylinstitute.org/product/closing-the-loop-using-real-time-feedback-to-improve-patient-experience/ Bain & Company, Closing the Loop (Net Promoter System, Charles Schwab and Apple, inner and outer loop): https://www.bain.com/insights/closing-the-loop/ Press Ganey, patient safety and likelihood to recommend (measurement vendor): https://www.pressganey.com/resources/blog/patient-experience-2025-new-trends/ CMS Patient Safety Structural Measures, 2025 (patient and family involvement as one of five components): CONFIRM URL before publish Baldrige Performance Excellence Program, voice of the customer criteria: https://www.nist.gov/baldrige TP68, Yelp or HCAHPS: Which is Better to Measure Patient Experience? (May 2018): https://touchpoint.health/podcast/tp68-yelp-or-hcahps-which-is-better-to-measure-patient-experience/ Unbound Snacks, Chris's recommendation (flavored walnuts): https://www.unboundsnacks.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

July 8, 202657 min

TP495 - Marketing Through the Messy Middle

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 provider deals now like-for-like consolidation, so the integration work is getting more attention than it used to. Then they are joined by their guest expert, Christine Albert. She has led marketing and experience through multiple integrations as a chief marketing and experience officer, and she calls this stretch the messy middle. She is practical about it. How to get marketing and digital into the deal conversation early. Why brand architecture is more than a logo lockup. Why the internal team should be the first audience you communicate with. And what the leaders who integrate well tend to do differently, starting sooner and treating the acquired team as an asset. In this episode, Chris, Reed and Christine cover: What a merger's financial model captures and what the integration work adds Where AI helps in an integration and where the work still runs on people How marketing, digital and experience earn a seat in the deal conversation early Why brand and internal communication shape how an integration lands What leaders who integrate well do differently from the first planning meeting If your system is in a deal, or headed toward one, this is a practical look at the work that shapes how it feels to patients and staff on the other side. touchpoint.health Mentions from the Show: Kaufman Hall, M&A Quarterly Activity Report Q1 2026 (22 transactions, strongest Q1 since 2020; Sutter and Allina 39-hospital, $26B): https://www.kaufmanhall.com/insights/research-report/ma-quarterly-activity-report-q1-2026 Kaufman Hall, 2025 Hospital and Health System M&A in Review (46 transactions, the quieter 2025 baseline): https://www.kaufmanhall.com/insights/research-report/hospital-and-health-system-2025-ma-review-uncertainty-transitions-continue McKinsey, US healthcare M&A: value through diversification, Feb 2026 (shift toward integration; 70 to 80% like-for-like): https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/m-and-a/our-insights/us-healthcare-companies-continue-to-create-value-through-diversification McKinsey, Healthcare private equity outlook, HPE Miami 2026 (operational execution ranked over financial engineering): https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/healthcare/our-insights/healthcare-blog/healthcare-private-equity-outlook-takeaways-from-hpe-miami-2026 PwC 2026 healthcare M&A outlook, via Fierce Healthcare, Dec 2025 (AI as a driver of margin and growth): https://www.fiercehealthcare.com/finance/key-trends-will-shape-healthcare-ma-activity-2026-pwc Christine Albert on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/christineyalbert/  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