『TouchPoints: Moments that Matter in Healthcare』のカバーアート

TouchPoints: Moments that Matter in Healthcare

TouchPoints: Moments that Matter in Healthcare

著者： Melissa Gilkes-Smith
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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, offering strategies that healthcare executives, practice administrators, and clinicians can apply immediately.

If you are passionate about improving healthcare delivery and creating better patient experiences, this podcast is for you.

© 2026 TouchPoints: Moments that Matter in Healthcare マネジメント マネジメント・リーダーシップ 出世 就職活動 経済学 衛生・健康的な生活
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  • Before You Sell, Get Your House in Order: What Physician-Led Practices Must Do to Maximize Value and Protect What They’ve Built

    Before You Sell, Get Your House in Order: What Physician-Led Practices Must Do to Maximize Value and Protect What They’ve Built
    2026/10/19
    Send us Fan MailBefore You Sell, Get Your House in Order: What Physician-Led Practices Must Do to Maximize Value and Protect What They’ve BuiltFeaturing Robert Howell, President and Founder of H2M Strategies Inc.You’ve spent years building your practice. You know the patients, the referral relationships, the people, and the work it takes to keep everything running.But when a buyer starts asking questions, knowing your practice is valuable and proving it are two different things.Where are the documented processes? What do your patient retention numbers show? Do your policies reflect what actually happens? And can the organization keep performing without the founding physician holding everything together?In this episode of TouchPoints: Moments that Matter in Healthcare, host Melissa Gilkes-Smith welcomes Robert “Rob” Howell to discuss closing the gap between the practice a physician believes they have built and the business a buyer can verify. The focus is on preparing before due diligence, not scrambling to explain operational weaknesses after a potential buyer discovers them. A profitable practice is not automatically a sale-ready practiceThe conversation begins with the “willpower organization”: a practice that runs on the founder’s energy, personal relationships, and institutional knowledge.What happens when the physician is the only person who understands how the business works? What happens when referral relationships belong to the individual rather than the organization? What happens when critical processes depend on someone remembering what to do instead of a system others can follow?Melissa and Rob explore founder dependency, operational transferability, and the questions these issues raise during a transaction. At the center of the discussion is a distinction: Have you built an organization that can sustain its performance, or one that requires you to keep making it work? Patient experience belongs in the valuation conversationPeople often discuss patient experience as a satisfaction initiative. This episode examines it as part of the infrastructure behind a practice’s value.Melissa connects her Nine Pillars of Patient Experience Framework to the consistency, documentation, and repeatability of the patient journey. Together, she and Rob explore what it means when patients receive a reliable experience across providers and locations, rather than an experience that depends on who happens to be working that day. The discussion also considers online reputation, patient loyalty, and referral relationships. What might review patterns reveal beyond a star rating? How are referral relationships documented and maintained? And how much of the practice’s reputation is supported by organizational systems rather than the founding physician’s personal network?These questions bring patient experience into a broader conversation about what the practice can demonstrate, and what can continue through a change in ownership. Documentation must reflect the practice people actually experienceA policy binder is not the same as a well-run organization.Melissa and Rob examine standard operating procedures (SOPs) across clinical workflows, scheduling, patient intake, billing, referral management, and staff onboarding. The discussion goes beyond whether these documents exist to ask whether staff use them, whether training supports them, and whether they accurately describe daily operations. They also explore policies and procedures through the lens of compliance, accountability, and buyer confidence. A policy that promises a response to patient complaints within 24 hours tells one story. A practice that routinely takes five days tells another.That gap between written expectations and lived experience connects organizational culture, patient experience, and readiness to transact. The episode asks how leaders can identify and address those gaps before they become part of a buyer’s assessment. The financial story needs operational supportThe conversation turns to the systems behind the numbers, including earnings quality, payer mix, revenue cycle performance, and management depth.Melissa and Rob explore what denial rates, aging accounts receivable, and billing processes may reveal about the way a practice operates. They also consider the role of a capable operational leader and whether the business can function without the physician as its only real manager.Rather than treating financial performance as separate from patient experience, this discussion connects both to the processes, people, and accountability structures supporting the practice. Preparing before the buyer arrivesFor physician-owners considering a sale in the next two to five years, the episode explores how to approach preparation deliberately. The conversation considers an initial assessment, prioritization, and the sequencing of patient experience improvements, SOP documentation, policy updates, and financial preparation ...
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    38 分
  • After the Visit Is When the Real Work Begins: Post-Visit Communication, Chronic Care, and the Technology Closing the Gap

    After the Visit Is When the Real Work Begins: Post-Visit Communication, Chronic Care, and the Technology Closing the Gap
    2026/10/12
    Send us Fan MailThe visit went well. The provider was thorough. The care plan was documented. The patient left with instructions.Now what?For many healthcare organizations, that is where the experience quietly breaks down. The patient walks out the door, the chart is complete, and the practice moves on to the next visit. But for the patient, especially a patient managing chronic conditions, the real work is just beginning.In this episode of TouchPoints: Moments that Matter in Healthcare, Melissa Gilkes-Smith sits down with Larry Estes of Subflow Health to explore Pillar 7 of the Nine Pillars of Patient Experience Framework: Post-Visit Communication.This touchpoint begins the moment a patient leaves the practice. It is also one of the most underinvested parts of the patient journey. Healthcare organizations often spend significant energy improving access, scheduling, check-in, the clinical encounter, and discharge instructions. But in the days and weeks after the visit, patients are expected to follow the care plan, manage medications, schedule follow-ups, monitor symptoms, complete referrals, and know when to ask for help.Too often, they are doing that alone.Melissa and Larry discuss the post-visit silence many patients experience and why it isn't neutral. When a patient does not hear from the practice after a visit, it can feel like indifference. The organization may see it as a staffing issue, a workflow gap, or a technology limitation. The patient simply knows no one followed up.That gap has real consequences. Confusion, non-adherence, missed follow-up appointments, avoidable utilization, and preventable deterioration often happen between visits, not during them. For patients with chronic conditions, the time between appointments is where health is either supported or left to unravel.Larry brings a practical perspective shaped by 20 years in healthcare operations, revenue cycle, chronic care management, and patient engagement. Together, he and Melissa explore why post-visit communication should not be treated as a courtesy or a satisfaction initiative. It is a clinical strategy. It is a financial strategy. And in a value-based care environment, it is increasingly a performance strategy.This conversation examines chronic care management and the opportunity many practices are missing. Patients with multiple chronic conditions often need ongoing support, but practices struggle to deliver that support consistently without overwhelming their teams. CCM creates a framework for structured engagement, care coordination, and reimbursement, but many organizations are not fully using it because the operational lift feels too heavy.That is where technology comes into the conversation.Larry explains how Subflow Health helps practices automate patient engagement and clinical workflows through tools like SMS, email, two-way communication, secure chat, and behavior capture. The point is not simply to send more messages. The point is to know whether patients acted on them.That distinction matters.A reminder is not the same as engagement. A message is not follow-through. Behavior capture gives practices insight into whether patients take the next step, follow instructions, respond to outreach, or fall through the cracks. That intelligence allows teams to intervene earlier and use their human capacity where it matters most.Melissa and Larry also discuss why SMS is such a powerful engagement channel. Patients shouldn't have to download an app, remember a portal password, or navigate another login just to get support after a visit. Meeting patients where they already are removes friction and improves engagement, especially for patients already carrying a heavy burden.This episode also connects post-visit communication to the Culture of Care values: accountability, compassion, empathy, and collaboration. Accountability asks whether the practice followed through on what it said it would do. Compassion recognizes that patients are managing real life between appointments. Empathy anticipates what patients may need before they have to ask. Collaboration means the practice does not leave the patient to coordinate the plan alone.For practice administrators, patient experience leaders, care coordinators, revenue cycle teams, and healthcare executives, this conversation is a direct challenge: stop treating post-visit communication as optional.The clinical encounter sets the plan.What happens after the visit determines whether the plan actually works.About Larry EstesLarry Estes of Subflow Health brings more than 20 years of experience across healthcare operations, outsourcing, clinical products, and healthcare business, with a strong focus on revenue cycle solutions. His work across healthcare technology and business organizations has shaped his focus on value-based care, chronic care management, and their connection to clinical and financial outcomes.In this conversation, Larry brings that operational perspective to a ...
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    44 分
  • When You Are Both the Expert and the Patient: Care, Chronic Illness, and the AI Relationship

    When You Are Both the Expert and the Patient: Care, Chronic Illness, and the AI Relationship
    2026/09/28
    Send us Fan MailWhen You Are Both the Expert and the Patient: Care, Chronic Illness, and the AI RelationshipThere are two ways to understand what it feels like to be a patient.You can study it. You can analyze the data, review the surveys, build the frameworks, and design better systems from the outside. That knowledge matters.But there is another kind of knowledge that comes from living inside the system itself: making the calls, tracking the referrals, repeating your history again, managing the prior authorizations, navigating the portal messages, correcting the record, and carrying the emotional weight of coordinating care that was never designed to be coordinated by the patient.In this episode of TouchPoints: Moments that Matter in Healthcare, Melissa Gilkes-Smith sits down with Meredith Mangold, CPXP, founder of Empower Health Strategies, for a conversation about patient experience from both sides of the system. Meredith has spent more than fifteen years working as a care experience strategist across hospitals, advocacy, and digital health while also navigating healthcare as a patient living with multiple chronic conditions.That dual perspective shapes the heart of this episode.Melissa and Meredith explore what lived experience adds to professional patient experience work, especially in complex care. They discuss what research and dashboards often miss: the invisible burden patients carry between appointments. For patients with chronic conditions, the experience of care is not limited to the clinical encounter. It includes the coordination calls, insurance issues, medication management, medical records, referrals, portal messages, and the ongoing need to advocate for yourself across systems that often do not communicate well with each other.This episode challenges healthcare leaders to think beyond what happens inside the visit. A patient may have a clinically appropriate appointment and still leave feeling unseen, unsupported, or exhausted by the work required to get there. The difference between being heard and being truly listened to becomes especially important for patients who know their own condition deeply and need that knowledge treated as a clinical resource, not a challenge to authority.Meredith brings language to the “reset problem” many complex patients experience: arriving at every new appointment and having to re-establish the full context of their health, their history, their symptoms, and their needs. That repetition costs more than time. It costs trust. It can make patients feel invisible, even when care teams are documenting what they say.The conversation also explores what it actually means for a patient to feel seen, supported, and empowered. These words are often used in healthcare, but they are not just values or branding language. They are design requirements. They have to show up in how care is coordinated, how information is shared, how patients are listened to, and how organizations take ownership of the gaps between touchpoints.Melissa and Meredith also move into one of the most urgent topics in healthcare today: the role of AI in the patient-provider relationship. Meredith reflects on how AI is beginning to enter clinical encounters and what that means for communication, trust, and the patient’s sense of human connection. They discuss where AI may genuinely help patients managing complex chronic conditions, especially when it supports clarity, organization, access, and communication across systems. But they also name the risk: that patients may experience AI as something replacing the human relationship they came for.This is not a conversation about whether AI is good or bad. It is a conversation about whether healthcare leaders are asking the right questions before bringing AI into the care experience. What problem is the technology solving? Whose burden is it reducing? What might it unintentionally make worse? How will patients know when a human is still present, accountable, and listening?For frontline care teams, this episode offers a practical reminder: small moments matter. The way a patient is received, the way their expertise is respected, the way next steps are clarified, and the way the team acknowledges the complexity of their journey can meaningfully change the experience.For healthcare leaders, the challenge is bigger. Traditional patient experience measures often miss the parts of care that are hardest on complex patients. The real questions are: Is the journey clear? Are the handoffs coordinated? Does the patient know what happens next? Who owns the gaps? And are we designing care around how patients actually experience it, or around how we wish the system worked?This episode is for patient experience leaders, clinicians, healthcare executives, innovators, digital health teams, and anyone responsible for designing care for people whose health journeys do not fit neatly into one appointment, one diagnosis, or one system.Because patients are not ...
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    1 時間 5 分
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