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
