Key Insights From the 10th Annual NGPX Healthcare Experience Conference

By Tye Cook, Senior Executive Director, Access Transformation 

Earlier this month, I had the privilege of attending the 10th annual NGPX Healthcare Experience Conference in Palm Springs. The gathering was a testament to the dynamic shifts happening in healthcare, driven by the shared goal of delivering exceptional experiences for both patients and employees. Below are my key takeaways and insights from this enlightening event. 

The Central Theme: Unified Experience 

The conference underscored a compelling truth: The best patient experiences emerge from environments where employees thrive. A standout session included Press Ganey’s correlation analysis, which revealed a 1:1 correlation between top-quartile employee satisfaction and top-quartile patient satisfaction. This alignment is especially relevant to Tegria’s focus on harmonizing supply and demand within healthcare systems, an approach that has the power to optimize resources while improving outcomes. 

Interestingly, many organizations are now restructuring to combine employee and patient experience into a single function. This strategic shift reflects a growing understanding that these two facets of healthcare are intrinsically linked. 

Inpatient vs. Outpatient: A Broader Lens Needed 

Unsurprisingly, much of the conversation focused on inpatient experience, driven by HCAHPS scores and reimbursement incentives. For healthcare executives, this is familiar territory—these measures have been a priority for years. 

However, the discussion highlighted an urgent need to look beyond inpatient settings. The majority of patient-staff interactions occur in outpatient environments, yet these touchpoints often lack equivalent focus. Developing outpatient experience metrics could be the next frontier for driving holistic improvements across the continuum of care. 

The Role of Physician Leadership and Change Management 

Physicians emerged as key players in healthcare transformation. Change management was a recurring theme, and a memorable takeaway was this simple yet profound insight: If you want to start an argument with a doctor, bring data. If you want progress, start by discussing common pain points. 

Physician leadership is critical for change. Data alone won’t drive healthcare transformation; the conversation must begin with shared challenges and build toward collective solutions. When physicians take the lead, change efforts are far more likely to succeed. 

Cool Tech: Tools for Actionable Insights and Collaboration 

The conference showcased several innovative technologies that are reshaping the healthcare landscape: 

• PEP Health: A social media sentiment analysis tool offering real-time insights into the populations served by healthcare organizations. It complements traditional survey data, which often lacks the depth and immediacy needed for actionable insights. 

• Q-Rounds: A practical communication platform designed to enhance rounding by bringing patients, families, physicians, nurses, and consultants into a cohesive dialogue. Its CEO’s storytelling skills captivated attendees, underscoring the platform’s real-world value in solving common communication challenges. 

• Authenticx: A healthcare-specific AI analysis solution that provides real-time quality assurance for contact centers looking to improve the speed of recovery and outreach over traditional quality assurance systems using AI-enabled sentiment analysis.  

Making the Office of Patient Experience Obsolete 

One of the most ambitious aspirations discussed at the conference was the idea of making the Office of Patient Experience obsolete over the next decade. Not because the focus on experience would diminish, but because it would become so deeply embedded in the culture of healthcare organizations that a separate office would no longer be necessary. 

This vision reflects the ultimate goal: for patient and employee experience to be a natural, seamless part of every interaction, driven by a culture where everyone is empowered to contribute to these outcomes. 

Access as the Rallying Cry for Transformation 

While the conference offered a wealth of ideas, there was a recognized need for a unifying theme—a “rallying cry” to bring these concepts together into a cohesive strategy. At Tegria, we believe that Access can be that rallying cry. 

Access is foundational. Whether it’s ensuring timely appointments, equipping staff with the resources they need, or integrating technology to streamline workflows, access is the common denominator that drives both employee and patient satisfaction.

When access is optimized, everything else—quality, efficiency, and experience—falls into place. 

Trust And Collaboration  

For many healthcare providers, delivering exceptional experiences may feel like an overwhelming task that competes with operational demands or requires more institutional support. However, experience is foundational to trust, transparency, and collaboration. These elements often depend on formal and informal leaders who can champion experience initiatives and drive meaningful change.

While experience is a shared responsibility across the organization, having senior leadership represented in a customer or patient experience is essential. This role and the function required for success requires leadership to work across functional silos by engaging and incorporating data from supporting systems that actively link clinical and non-clinical data to ensure the proper level of personalization, quality, and outcomes.  

Opportunity With AI-Enabled Experience

With AI being covered in a variety of healthcare spaces with both clinical and non-clinical applications and with the advancement of caller analysis, sentiment, and frustration detection, the integration of AI from both a self-service and quality perspective has the potential to improve the level of services provided while also providing near-real-time review and outreach for experience encounters that may not be a good reflection of the operational standard. While it’s still relatively new and still being explored, there was a lot of interest in seeing how healthcare organizations can use AI to improve experience-related encounters and outcomes from both proactive training as well as prioritized outreach by integrating survey tools that can be more attuned to seeking comprehensive and timely feedback.   

Final Thoughts 

The NGPX conference reinforced that creating exceptional experiences in healthcare is not about siloed improvements but about embracing a systems approach. By combining employee and patient experience under one umbrella, engaging physicians in meaningful leadership roles, leveraging innovative technology, and rallying around the unifying theme of access, we can drive transformative change. 

By building on a system of integrated and thoughtful experience-oriented strategies, a focus on culture, AI-enabled experience systems, and more strategy experience-oriented outreach and feedback continue to show promise by being centrally available within leading healthcare-oriented customer relationship management systems. The convergence of the data, with the proper organizational structure, training, and technology, has a profound opportunity to create an experience flywheel that can offer personalized, continuously improved experience encounters with a higher degree of engagement, which we believe will lead to improved healthcare outcomes.  

As we look to the future, it’s clear that aligning the needs of patients, employees, and healthcare organizations is not just a strategy—it’s a necessity for building a more sustainable and patient-centered system. 

I left Palm Springs inspired by the progress being made and energized to continue the conversation. How can we, as a healthcare community, further bridge the gap between patient and employee experience? Let’s keep the dialogue going!