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.
In this episode, Chris, Reed and the guests cover:
- Why judging clinical quality by a website is rational behavior under uncertainty rather than a failure of patient education
- What Stanford found about design look driving credibility, and why a 2003 study still describes 2026
- Why audited quality data keeps losing to reputation, reviews and how the experience feels
- Whether ease is a durable advantage or a debt every system is repaying at a different speed
- What an adult without a usual source of care actually costs, and who is counting them
- Why the people who give up do not show up as lost market share, and what you would have to build to see them
The question this episode leaves you with is not how your conversion rate looks. It is how many people started to become your patient this month, stopped and went nowhere at all. touchpoint.health
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
