TouchPoints: Moments that Matter in Healthcare
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.
Episodes
11 episodes
Stop Holding It Together: Leadership, Coaching, and the Architecture of a High-Performing Healthcare Practice
Healthcare leaders are often praised for holding everything together. But what happens when the organization only works because one exhausted leader keeps pushing, solving, absorbing, and carrying what the system itself should be designed to ho...
Stop Sending Reminders. Start Preparing Patients.
A Step-by-Step Guide to Pre-Visit Communication That Actually WorksMost healthcare practices send appointment reminders. What they are not sending is preparation. In this solo how-to episode, Melissa Gilkes-Smith walks th...
Lost Before They Walk In: How Wayfinding and Arrival Design Shape the Patient Experience
The patient experience does not begin at the front desk. It begins the moment a patient enters the parking lot.A patient may arrive worried about a diagnosis, experiencing pain, running late, or visiting an unfamiliar facility for the fi...
Hello, Is Anyone There? Reimagining Healthcare Scheduling with AI
The phone call is still one of the most important touchpoints in the patient journey. It is also one of the most broken.In this episode of TouchPoints: Moments that Matter in Healthcare
The 8-Second Decision: How Patients Find You Online Before They Ever Call
The patient experience does not begin at check-in. It begins the moment someone hears your name.In this episode of TouchPoints: Moments that Matter in Healthcare, Melissa Gilkes-Smith sits down with Ancil Lea, founder of Ancil L...
The Referral Relationship: How Physician Liaison Work Shapes the Patient Journey Before It Begins
A physician referral is more than a name passed from one office to another. It is an act of trust.In this episode of TouchPoints: Moments that Matter in Healthcare, Melissa Gilkes-Smith sits down with Shayda Amaya, a healthcare ...
Leadership by Walking Around:How Being Seen and Available Changes Everything
Culture is not what you post on the wall. It is what leadership does when no one is watching, and everything changes when they start walking the floor.In this episode of TouchPoints: Moments that Matter, host Melissa Gilkes-Smith explore...
The Irreplaceable Provider:How Clinician Communication Defines the Patient Experience
The patient is in the room. The provider walks in. And what happens next will define more of the patient’s felt experience than almost anything else in the entire care journey.In this episode of TouchPoints: Moments that Matter, host Mel...
Culture Doesn’t Eat Strategy. It Digests It.
Everyone in healthcare has heard it: “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” It gets nodded at in boardrooms, printed on culture decks, and repeated until it stops meaning anything. But what if that framing is not just incomplete, it’s actual...
Why I Started Paying Attention to the Touchpoints
TouchPoints — Episode 1: Why I Started Paying Attention to the TouchpointsWhat if "great clinical care" and "a great patient experience" aren't the same thing, and almost nobody is running the second one on purpose?In t...
Welcome to TouchPoints: Where Every Moment in Healthcare Matters
Welcome to TouchPoints: Moments That Matter in Healthcare, the podcast for leaders, clinicians, and early careerists who believe that how we deliver care matters as much as the care itself.Each episode, we'll explore the people, practice...