TouchPoints: Moments that Matter in Healthcare

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Featuring 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 practice

The 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 conversation

People 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 experience

A 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 support

The 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 arrives

For 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 alongside the ongoing demands of running a practice.  

The episode closes with a challenge: Review your practice’s most recent Google reviews and your scheduling data from the last 90 days. If a buyer walked in tomorrow, what would those records tell them? What would reassure them, and what would give them pause?  

For physician-owners, practice managers, healthcare executives, and patient experience leaders, this conversation is about more than preparing for a transaction. It is about examining whether the organization’s systems reflect the quality, consistency, and value its leaders believe they have built.

About Robert Howell

Robert Howell is President and Founder of H2M Strategies Inc. and a healthcare growth expert with more than 25 years of experience advising physician-led and healthcare services organizations.

Formerly Vice President of Growth and Development at Center for Vein Restoration, Robert brings both hands-on operational experience and an advisory perspective to healthcare growth and strategy.   His expertise includes market expansion, strategic development, and execution-focused growth initiatives aligned with defined deliverables and outcomes.

Connect with Rob HERE on LinkedIn.

Subscribe to TouchPoints: Moments that Matter in Healthcare for conversations about patient experience, operational excellence, and the leadership behind the moments that matter.

Find more insights on Patient Experience, Healthcare Operations, and Healthcare Leadership HERE on the HMCG blog. 

Because a remarkable patient experience doesn't happen by accident - it happens by design. 

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The 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 Estes

Larry 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 patient-centered challenge: how practices can provide more consistent post-visit support while building workflows their teams can sustain.

Connect with Larry on LinkedIn. 

Subscribe to TouchPoints: Moments that Matter in Healthcare for conversations about patient experience, operational excellence, and the leadership behind the moments that matter.

Because a remarkable patient experience doesn't happen by accident - it happens by design. 

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When You Are Both the Expert and the Patient: Care, Chronic Illness, and the AI Relationship

There 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 passive recipients of care.

They are active participants in a system that often asks more of them than leaders realize.

And until healthcare designs for that reality, every patient experience strategy is incomplete.

You can connect with Meredith on LinkedIn HERE and follow Empower Health Strategies HERE on LinkedIn.

Because a remarkable patient experience doesn't happen by accident - it happens by design. 

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Three out of four Americans say their personal doctor is the most trusted voice in their healthcare decisions. That number holds across every political ideology. No agency, no institution, no government messenger comes close.

And yet, 42% of those same Americans deliberately acted against their clinician's recommendation in the past year.

Not because they distrust their doctor. Because they don't trust the system their doctor works inside.

That is the healthcare trust paradox. And it is not just a communications problem or a policy problem. It is a patient experience problem. And in this episode, we talk about what we can actually do about it.

My guest is Ryan Cohn, Partner and Chief Strategy Officer at Sachs Media and founder of SachsHEALTH, the firm's specialized healthcare division. Ryan brings the findings from the 2026 SachsHEALTH Influence Index, a national survey of 2,500 American adults, that measures the disconnect between who Americans consider influential in healthcare and who they actually want in the room.

The data is clear, specific, and urgent. We dig into all of it.

What you'll hear in this episode:

• Why patients trust their doctor but act against their advice, and what is actually happening in that gap
• The influence gap: clinicians have 26% perceived influence, but 58% of Americans say they should have more. The widest gap of any group measured.
• What 42% active noncompliance looks like in practice: delayed treatments, skipped tests, self-directed medication changes, and what that costs clinically
• Why only 52% of Americans trust the healthcare system to act in their best interests, and what distrust is doing to behavior before patients even walk through your door
• The cost crisis: 54% name affordability as their top concern. 63% worry it will force serious financial sacrifices. This is nonpartisan, pervasive, and changing patient behavior before the clinical encounter begins.
• Three controlled experiments that reveal what actually moves people: who says it, how it's framed, and who signed off on it, and why a doctor outperformed every agency and political messenger across every ideology
• Five moves for making the invisible hand of healthcare visible, and what each one means for patient experience strategy

The listener challenge:

Look at the last three pieces of communication your practice sent to patients. Ask yourself: does this make the invisible hand visible? Does it acknowledge what patients are actually worried about? And does it use the voice they trust most, or the institutional voice they trust least?

About Ryan Cohn
Ryan Cohn is Partner and Chief Strategy Officer at Sachs Media and founder of SachsHEALTH. He has spent nearly two decades advising health systems, pharmaceutical companies, patient groups, and industry associations on public affairs, advocacy, and crisis communications across more than 35 states and Washington, D.C.

Connect with Ryan on LinkedIn.

Full report: Sachs Media Influence Index

TouchPoints: Moments that Matter is hosted by Melissa Gilkes-Smith, founder of HMCG and creator of the Nine Pillars of Patient Experience Framework and the Focused Leader Program.

Connect with Melissa on LinkedIn. 

Visit the Healthcare Management Consulting Group website for more insights on patient experience.

Because a remarkable patient experience doesn't happen by accident - it happens by design. 

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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 hold?

In this episode of TouchPoints: Moments that Matter in Healthcare, Melissa Gilkes-Smith sits down with Markes Rembert Jr., MBA, MS, ACC, to explore what 18 years inside healthcare and dental operations can teach us about leadership, operational architecture, and the hidden cost of running an organization on willpower.

Markes brings experience across community health centers, academic dental institutions, multi-site practice environments, and his current work at Callen-Lorde Community Health Center. Together, Melissa and Markes discuss how mission-driven healthcare settings shape leadership, why identity-conscious leadership matters, and how operational problems often reveal something deeper: the leader’s own patterns, pressure points, and blind spots.

The conversation introduces the idea of the “willpower organization” — a workplace where high-performing leaders compensate for weak systems through personal effort, urgency, and over-functioning. While this may look like dedication from the outside, it eventually costs the leader, the team, and the patient experience.

At the center of the episode is Markes’ CPRCAR framework, a six-step operational leadership model designed to help healthcare leaders move from reactive management to a structure that can actually sustain performance. Melissa and Markes walk through how the framework works, where leaders often get stuck, and how stronger operational architecture supports culture, accountability, team dynamics, and patient care.

They also discuss executive coaching in healthcare: what it is, why leaders resist it, and how tools like the Hogan Assessment can help identify derailment risk — the moment when a leader’s greatest strength becomes a liability under pressure.

This episode is for healthcare executives, practice managers, operations leaders, dental leaders, and anyone who has ever wondered whether they are leading a high-performing organization or simply holding a fragile one together.

Because strong leadership is not about carrying everything yourself.

It is about building something that can hold.

Connect with Markes on LinkedIn or visit his website at coachmarkes.com 

Because a remarkable patient experience doesn't happen by accident - it happens by design. 

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A Step-by-Step Guide to Pre-Visit Communication That Actually Works

Most healthcare practices send appointment reminders. What they are not sending is preparation. In this solo how-to episode, Melissa Gilkes-Smith walks through all twelve steps of building a pre-visit communication system that actually reduces patient anxiety, improves check-in flow, and demonstrates a Culture of Care before the patient ever walks through the door. This is an interactive working session; download the Pre-Visit Communication Workbook from the show notes and work through each step in real time.

RESOURCES

Pre-Visit Communication Workbook  

PX360 Assessment 

Because a remarkable patient experience doesn't happen by accident - it happens by design. 

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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 first time. If the entrance is difficult to identify, parking instructions are unclear, or signs fail to provide direction at critical decision points, that patient can become anxious and frustrated before speaking with anyone on the care team.

In this episode of TouchPoints: Moments that Matter in Healthcare, Melissa Gilkes-Smith speaks with Lauren Nitschke, an architectural graphics, signage, and wayfinding expert whose career spanned 40 years. Together, they explore how parking, entrances, signage, landmarks, facility layout, and other environmental cues shape the arrival experience and influence how patients feel as they enter the clinical encounter.

Lauren explains why wayfinding is not simply a collection of signs. It is a coordinated system designed to help people understand where they are, where they need to go, and what decision they must make next. Adding more signs without evaluating the entire navigation system can create information overload, contradictory directions, and even greater confusion.

The conversation examines why healthcare wayfinding must be designed for the stressed, first-time user rather than the employees who already know the facility. Melissa and Lauren discuss common problems such as unclear patient entrances, exterior signs that cannot be read from a vehicle, inconsistent terminology, outdated signage following renovations, poorly planned color-coding, and missing information at essential decision points.

They also explore the operational consequences of poor wayfinding. When employees must repeatedly stop their work to redirect lost patients, staff members become the facility’s unofficial navigation system. The organization absorbs the cost through interruptions, delayed appointments, frustrated patients, and added pressure on frontline teams.

Listeners will learn:

• Why a patient’s arrival experience can influence the clinical encounter that follows
• How stress, pain, and anxiety affect a person’s ability to process navigational information
• The difference between signage and a comprehensive wayfinding system
• Why entrances, parking areas, landmarks, lighting, contrast, placement, and terminology must work together
• How to identify and evaluate critical decision points throughout the patient’s journey
• What organizations should consider when conducting a patient-centered wayfinding audit
• Which improvements may offer meaningful results without requiring a major capital project
• When a facility should consider engaging a professional wayfinding specialist
• How the built environment communicates accountability, compassion, empathy, and preparation before anyone says hello

The episode also addresses accessibility as an essential part of effective signage. Organizations can review the U.S. Access Board’s Guide to the ADA Accessibility Standards, Chapter 7: Signs for information about visual and tactile signage requirements, raised characters, Grade 2 braille, non-glare finishes, contrast, character size, mounting height and location, directional and informational signs, and required accessibility symbols. ADA compliance is an essential baseline, but a truly effective wayfinding system must also help patients navigate the entire arrival journey clearly, confidently, and with dignity.

Lauren began her career in architecture before making a life-changing move into environmental design. Her background in architectural planning, graphic design, and three-dimensional visualization became the foundation for a career devoted to architectural graphics, signage, and wayfinding. She found hospital projects particularly meaningful because they serve so many first-time visitors who are often navigating unfamiliar spaces under unusually stressful conditions.

Now retired after selling her business, Lauren and her husband raise grassfed and finished cattle on their ranch in Southern Oklahoma, an endeavor they began alongside their design work approximately 20 years ago.

This episode is part of Pillar Four, Arrival and Check-In, within the Nine Pillars of Patient Experience Framework. It challenges healthcare leaders to walk through their facilities as first-time patients, identify every moment of uncertainty, and recognize a simple truth: a patient who arrives lost and anxious carries that experience into the exam room.

Wayfinding is not cosmetic. It is part of the care infrastructure.

Connect with Lauren on LinkedIn or checkout her grass-fed cattle products here: https://www.nnbeef.com/ 

Because a remarkable patient experience doesn't happen by accident - it happens by design. 

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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, Melissa Gilkes-Smith sits down with Mathieu Rihet, founder of Novoflow, to explore how AI voice agents are changing the way healthcare practices manage inquiry and scheduling.

This conversation focuses on Pillar 2 of the Nine Pillars of Patient Experience Framework: Inquiry and Scheduling. For many patients, the first real interaction with a practice happens when they call to ask a question, schedule an appointment, or figure out what to do next. When that experience includes long hold times, transfers, repeated explanations, or unclear next steps, trust erodes before care even begins.

Melissa and Mathieu discuss what AI voice agents actually do, how they differ from traditional phone trees or chatbots, and why 24/7 scheduling support may be more than just a convenience. It may be an access and equity issue for patients who cannot call during normal business hours.

They also have an honest conversation about the risks. AI is not automatically an improvement in patient experience. Poorly implemented technology can make care feel colder, faster, and less human. The episode explores what healthcare leaders need to consider before adopting AI, including workflow readiness, HIPAA compliance, staff communication, patient escalation pathways, EHR integration, and accountability when something goes wrong.

At the center of the conversation is one key question: does this technology help patients feel better served, or does it simply help the organization move faster?

This episode is for healthcare leaders, practice managers, patient experience professionals, call center teams, and anyone thinking seriously about how technology can support access without sacrificing empathy.

Connect with Mathieu on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mathieurihet/ 

Visit the Novaflow website: https://www.novoflow.io/

**A quick production note: I recorded this conversation using a backup microphone, so my audio may sound a little different than usual. The conversation was far too valuable not to share, so let’s get into it. 

Because a remarkable patient experience doesn't happen by accident - it happens by design. 

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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 Lea Consulting Co., to explore Initial Exposure, the first pillar of the Nine Pillars of Patient Experience Framework.

Before a patient ever calls your office, schedules an appointment, or walks through your door, they are already forming an opinion about your practice. They search your name, scan your reviews, visit your website, check your Google Business Profile, look at your social media, and decide whether your organization feels credible, accessible, and trustworthy.

Melissa and Ancil discuss why this early decision point matters so much in healthcare, where trust is fragile, and first impressions carry real weight. They explore what patients are actually looking for online, how to evaluate your website through the eyes of a first-time patient, why online reviews should be treated as operational data, and how inaccurate digital information can create friction before the patient journey even begins.

This conversation also examines the connection between branding and patient experience. Your brand is not just what you say about your practice. It is what patients consistently experience. When your digital presence promises compassion, convenience, or access, your operations have to deliver on that promise.

This episode is for healthcare leaders, practice managers, marketers, physicians, and anyone responsible for creating a patient experience that earns trust before the first phone call.

You can connect with Ancil Lea on LinkedIn, or visit his website, ancillea.com.

Because a remarkable patient experience doesn't happen by accident - it happens by design. 

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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 business development leader with more than 20 years of experience across the healthcare continuum, to explore how physician liaison work shapes the patient journey before the patient ever schedules an appointment.

Together, they discuss why referral relationships are not simply a sales strategy, but a critical part of patient experience design. Shayda shares what strong physician liaison work actually looks like, how trust is built with referring providers, and why the referred patient’s experience becomes a direct reflection of the organization receiving the referral.

This conversation connects physician referral strategy to the first pillar of the Nine Pillars of Patient Experience Framework: Initial Exposure. For many specialty practices, surgical centers, and healthcare organizations, the patient’s first impression does not come from Google or social media. It comes from the confidence their physician has in making the referral.

Melissa and Shayda also discuss how organizations can reduce the burden on patients and caregivers by creating clearer, more reliable referral pathways, closing communication gaps, and treating the first referral as the beginning of a long-term relationship.

This episode is for healthcare leaders, physician liaisons, practice managers, marketers, and anyone responsible for building referral networks that are rooted in trust, access, communication, and patient-centered follow-through.

Because a remarkable patient experience doesn't happen by accident - it happens by design.