TP497 – We’ve Seen This Before (and That’s the Problem)

Touch Point Podcast
Touch Point Podcast
TP497 - We've Seen This Before (and That's the Problem)
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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 and Reed 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 Divas and Mike Schneider of Greystone 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

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Reed Smith

VP @jarrardinc, Advisor @MayoClinic Social Media Network and @SXSW Health & MedTech. @SocialHealthIns and @tpmnetwork founder

Chris Boyer

Principal, @chrisboyer LLC  Using digital marketing, experience and UCD/CX to transform healthcare. Co-host of the touch point podcast and founder of the Touch Point Media network. 

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