Humanizing Healthcare

In this episode of Humanizing Healthcare, Chris Malone talks with Steve Meth, Vice President and Chief Patient Experience Officer at Johns Hopkins Medicine, about how healthcare organizations can listen more effectively to patients and families and turn those insights into meaningful improvements in care.

Steve’s path to patient experience began with seeing firsthand what can happen when communication, coordination and trust break down. Those experiences ultimately led him from law into healthcare, where he has spent his career working to prevent harm and strengthen connections among patients, families and clinicians.

Steve shares how Johns Hopkins Medicine is taking a long-term approach to patient experience, including simulation-based learning that helps clinicians practice difficult patient encounters, virtual patient and family advisors who broaden the voices represented in improvement efforts, and post-discharge calls that help identify potential care issues while bringing patients’ actual voices into the organization.

The conversation also explores how patient experience, patient safety and employee engagement reinforce one another; how technology can support stronger relationships; and why sustainable improvement requires patience, data, listening and a willingness to keep learning.

Key Takeaways

02:49 How Steve Meth Found His Path Into Patient Experience

06:43 Why Sustainable Change Requires Long-Term Thinking

10:52 Building a Long-Term Patient Experience Strategy at Johns Hopkins

13:25 Why Clinicians Need Coaches, Too

18:18 Expanding Who Gets Heard Through Patient and Family Advisors

20:26 Using AI to Turn Patient Feedback Into Action

20:52 The Power of Calling Patients After Discharge

21:25 Why Hearing the Patient’s Actual Voice Matters

22:28 How Post-Discharge Calls Are Improving Care and Preventing Harm

24:26 Finding New Ways to Listen and Respond to Patients

26:01 How Peer-to-Peer Support Helps Patients and Families

27:10 Building Relationships Beyond the Hospital Stay

31:05 Balancing Technology With Human Connection

34:17 Building Leadership Support for Long-Term Change

39:35 Creating a Consistent Experience Across a Health System

42:23 Why Yesterday’s Success May Not Be Enough for Tomorrow

Additional Resources

Additional Resources Steve Meth on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/empathy-forward/ Johns Hopkins Medicine: https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/

PRC: https://www.prcexcellence.com/

Fidelum Health: https://fidelumhealth.com/

Unlock the power of The HUMAN Remedy™ insights model: https://fidelumhealth.com/services/

In this episode of Humanizing Healthcare, we sit down with Michelle Brady, Director of Patient Experience and Relationship-Based Care at MyMichigan Health, to explore why strong relationships are at the heart of great healthcare experiences.

A registered nurse with more than three decades of healthcare experience, Michelle brings a clinician’s perspective to patient experience leadership. She explains MyMichigan Health’s relationship-based care model, which starts with caring for yourself, extends to relationships with colleagues, and ultimately strengthens relationships with patients, families, and the communities healthcare organizations serve.

In this conversation, Michelle shares practical ways caregivers can create meaningful human connections without adding more work or requiring more time. She explains why “words matter,” how eye contact and simply sitting beside a patient can build trust in seconds, and why healthcare should reconsider language such as “frontline workers” and “boots on the ground.” She also discusses how patient stories and Patient and Family Advisory Councils can uncover insights that survey scores alone may miss.

Michelle also offers a thoughtful perspective on artificial intelligence and healthcare technology. Rather than allowing technology to further separate caregivers from patients, she believes organizations should use it to reduce administrative burdens and give caregivers more time for human connection. At MyMichigan Health, ambient listening technology is already helping clinicians spend less time documenting and more time looking at and talking with their patients.

If you lead patient experience, care for patients directly, or are working to build a more human-centered healthcare culture, this conversation offers practical ideas for making relationships part of how care is delivered every day.

Key Takeaways

02:21 How Michelle Brady Found Her Calling in Nursing

04:16 How 37 Years in Healthcare Shaped Her Approach to Patient Experience

05:23 The Four Relationships at the Heart of Relationship-Based Care

08:58 Why Better Patient Experience Doesn't Always Require More Time

12:47 Why Words Matter—and Language Healthcare Should Reconsider

15:23 Listening Beyond Patient Experience Survey Scores

18:50 What Patient and Family Advisory Councils Can Teach Healthcare Leaders

20:28 Why Patient Experience Shouldn't Feel Like “One More Thing”

22:10 Connecting Caregivers With Their Purpose—and Recognizing What They Do Right

23:57 Using AI to Create More Time for Human Connection

26:29 Why Human Connection Can't Be Treated as an Extra

28:20 Making Human Connection Part of Daily Healthcare Operations

29:54 Connecting Employee Engagement With Patient Experience

31:54 Where AI Helps—and Where Patients Still Need a Human Being

32:47 Why Healthcare Is Never Routine for the Patient and Family

Additional Resources

Michelle Brady on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michelle-brady-mshal-bsn-rn-cpxp-2aaa32a9/

Learn more about Fidelum Health: https://fidelumhealth.com/

PRC on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/prcexcellence/

In this episode of Humanizing Healthcare, we sit down with Dr. Todd Otten—board-certified family physician, co-author of Ripple of Change, and Executive Producer of the new documentary Suck It Up, Buttercup: Trust & Betrayal – Healthcare in America—to explore why so many clinicians have become disillusioned with modern medicine and what it will take to restore trust across the healthcare system.

Key Takeaways

03:22 How Dr. Todd Otten Found His Path Into Medicine

04:40 How Physician Burnout Changed His Career and Mission

06:47 The Personal “Ripple” That Led Him Into Healthcare Advocacy

09:48 The Story Behind the Title Suck It Up, Buttercup

13:19 How Learned Helplessness Takes Hold in Healthcare

14:57 Why Burnout Reflects a Dysfunctional Healthcare System

17:12 How Ambient AI Scribes Could Help—or Add More Pressure

18:37 Why Time and Trust Are Essential to the Clinician-Patient Relationship

20:46 How Direct Primary Care Rebuilds Access, Relationships, and Joy in Practice

23:12 The Physician Mental Health and Suicide Crisis

26:35 Healthcare Organizations That Are Putting People and Well-Being First

28:16 How to Watch and Support Suck It Up, Buttercup

30:19 How Impact Networks Can Break Down Healthcare Silos

31:28 The One Ripple of Change Everyone Can Start Tomorrow

32:31 Maya Angelou, Authenticity, and How Patients Remember Their Care

Additional Resources

Buttercup: Trust & Betrayal – Healthcare in America (Documentary):https://www.gofundme.com/f/support-suck-it-up-buttercup-documentary

Make a donation in any amount to the GoFundMe campaign and you'll receive an access code to view the full documentary online.

In this episode, we talk with Jennifer Carron, Patient Experience Officer at BJC HealthCare about reveals how one of the Midwest's largest health systems is rethinking care from the ground up.

Jennifer Carron didn't plan a career in healthcare — she fought her way into it as a mother sitting beside her critically ill son's hospital bed, watching what real relationship-centered care looked like for the first time. Today she leads patient experience across BJC Healthcare's 24-hospital, $11-billion system, and she joins Chris Malone to share the frameworks that are actually moving the needle.

Episode Description

This conversation covers the full spectrum of modern patient experience strategy. Jen explains why healthcare's biggest gap isn't clinical quality — it's communication, visibility, and friction reduction. She walks through BJC's Disney-inspired Emergency Department wait experience design, where EMR-automated text updates guide patients through every step of their visit without adding a single task to clinical staff. She makes a sharp distinction between real-time in-visit feedback and post-discharge surveys, describes an EMR-driven risk model that predicts poor patient experiences before they happen, and explains why transition of care remains the single greatest source of patient leakage. On AI, she urges both optimism and caution: generative AI can act as a digital concierge for complex care navigation, but it cannot yet reliably detect fear, hesitation, or confusion the way an experienced caregiver can. She closes with the business case every PX leader needs: experience strategy drives retention, activation, and growth — and AI is already synthesizing publicly reported data to tell patients which health system to choose.

Key Takeaways

02:42 Jen's personal story: critically ill son and the physician who changed everything

07:07 BJC Healthcare: scale, markets, and mission

08:07 Why healthcare still lags behind other service industries

09:30 Designing the Emergency Department wait experience — lessons from Disney

11:35 EMR automation and real-time patient text updates in the ED

12:41 Real-time in-visit feedback vs. post-discharge surveys

14:50 Consistency across 44,000 staff and 60 caregiver touchpoints

17:02 Friction vs. effort and why transition of care drives patient leakage

19:43 Healthcare as relationship, not transaction — the cost of patients who go nowhere

20:06 Generative AI as digital concierge — promise and caution

23:00 How AI is reshaping how patients shop for healthcare organizations

24:45 Making the business case for patient experience to finance and operations

27:54 Patient Family Advisory Councils and co-design at BJC

30:50 Implementing real-time feedback: EMR risk prediction and staff buy-in

33:47 What patients would notice first in a truly patient-centered system

34:34 Jen's favorite quote: every system is perfectly designed to get the results it gets

Additional Resources

Jennifer Carron LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jen-carron/

BJC Healthcare: https://www.bjc.org

Fidelum Health: https://fidelumhealth.com/

Fidelum Health LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/fidelum-health/

In this episode of Humanizing Healthcare, we sit down with Jason Wolf, President and CEO of the Beryl Institute, to mark three years of the podcast and take stock of where the patient experience movement stands.

Jason founded the Beryl Institute in 2010 with a simple belief: that if healthcare leaders had a safe, neutral space to share ideas honestly, the whole field would get better. Sixteen years and 85,000 engaged members across 85 countries later, that bet has paid off.

In this conversation, he breaks down how the definition of "experience" has evolved from patient satisfaction scores to a full human experience framework, one that includes patients, families, workforce, and community. He talks about why culture was always at the heart of that definition, what practical signs tell you an organization is genuinely human-centered, and why leaders still playing Whac-A-Mole with their metrics are building on shaky ground. He also makes the case for injecting experience education into medical schools before clinicians ever set foot on a unit, and what we lose when we wait until they're already in the building.

If you lead, manage, or influence care delivery at any level, this conversation gives you the frameworks and the language to make the case for experience at the top of your organization.

🎧 Take a listen.

Takeaways

03:55 How Jason Wolf Found His Path Into Healthcare

08:55 How the Definition of Patient Experience Has Evolved Over 16 Years

12:55 How to Make the Case for Human Experience to a CEO in 60 Seconds

16:55 Why Caring for Your Workforce Is Caring for Your Patients

19:55 Why Experience Needs to Be Taught in Medical Schools

23:45 What a Truly Human-Centered Culture Looks Like in Practice

26:35 What Surveys and Scores Are Actually For

30:25 Why Every Role in the Building Shapes the Patient Experience

37:55 What the US Can Learn From Countries Without CAHPS

39:55 Anne Frank and Why You Don't Have to Wait to Change Healthcare

Jason Wolf LinkedIn

The Beryl Institute

Story Submission Link for New Book

Fidelum Health LinkedIn Page

Unlock the power of our HUMAN Brand™ insights model

In this episode of Humanizing Healthcare, we speak with Camille Haycock— Senior Vice President and Chief Patient Experience Officer at CommonSpirit Health — about what it actually takes to embed human kindness into the operational, cultural, and clinical fabric of a national health system.

CommonSpirit spans hospitals, clinics, and community care settings across more than two dozen states. Camille leads the enterprise-wide effort to make patient experience consistent, measurable, and mission-driven at that scale — not as a standalone initiative, but as an organizational imperative that lives at the board level alongside quality, safety, and financial performance.

She talks about why patient experience and quality can never be treated as separate workstreams, how her team turns 1,600 daily patient comments into actionable insight, and why the tactics for improving experience have to be tailored to each care setting — from inpatient units to emergency department hallways where patients are boarding for hours. She also shares what it looks like to teach human kindness systematically, and why the caregivers who drove 90 miles to a patient's funeral didn't do it because of a program.

If you want to understand how compassionate care gets operationalized across a complex system — and what leadership really looks like when kindness is the strategy — this is the episode.

🎧 Take a listen.

Key Takeaways:

03:00 Camille's path from clinical nursing to enterprise patient experience leadership

04:20 Why human kindness is embedded in CommonSpirit's organizational intent

05:50 Why patient experience and quality and safety cannot be separated

07:15 How CommonSpirit customizes experience improvement across five distinct care settings

08:30 Turning 1,600 daily patient comments into insight with AI and quantitative data

10:20 The Emmanuel Hospital story: what human kindness looks like in the final 19 days

12:25 How retreats, rounding, and relational training support frontline caregivers

15:05 What clinical background gives a patient experience leader that can't be taught from the outside 17:20 Influence without authority: the leadership skills that matter most in this role

19:10 Building a shared culture of human kindness across a highly decentralized organization

22:00 Patient throughput and patient experience

24:25 Maya Angelou and why how you make people feel is the only thing that lasts

Additional Resources

Camille Haycock LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/camille-haycock/

CommonSpirit Health: https://www.commonspirit.org/

#HumanizingHealthcare #PatientExperience #CompassionateCare

In this episode of Humanizing Healthcare, we speak with Stephanie Abbott — author, speaker, and former Chief Experience Officer — about what healthcare leaders miss when they've only ever seen the system from the inside.

Stephanie spent years leading patient experience strategy at major health systems, including Adventist Health. She understood patient experience intellectually. Then she became a cancer patient — and realized how much she didn't know. She shares what it felt like to spend 63 days not knowing if she would survive, and 83 days waiting to start treatment. She explains why those gaps weren't failures of compassion — they were failures of design. And why fixing them requires more than launching a new PX program.

This conversation gets into the difference between measuring satisfaction and understanding trust, why employee experience and patient experience can't be separated, and what it actually takes for leaders to build systems where compassion is sustainable — not just expected. If you want to understand what humanizing healthcare really demands of its leaders, this is the episode.

🎧 Take a listen.

Key Takeaways

02:50 Stephanie's path from healthcare operations to patient experience leadership

04:15 What becoming a cancer patient revealed that years of executive experience didn't

05:55 The 63 days, the 83 days, and what they say about system design

08:45 The difference between launching PX programs and actually transforming culture

12:45 Why employee experience sets the ceiling for patient experience

10:05 How leaders should be interpreting experience data and metrics

17:10 What healthcare needs to look like in the next 5–10 years

24:45 Stephanie's book: Buried or Planted

Additional Resources

Stephanie's book: Buried or Planted Additional Resources: Stephanie Abbott's book — Buried or Planted: https://www.amazon.com/Buried-Planted-Insights-Healthcare-Executives/dp/B0D4Q9QM78

Stephanie Abbott's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stephanie-s-abbott/

hxology: https://www.hxology.com/

Story Submission Link for New Book: https://forms.gle/32juxZ7aYFSuugBi7

Fidelum Health LinkedIn Page: https://www.linkedin.com/company/fidelum-health/

Planetree LinkedIn Page: https://www.linkedin.com/company/planetree/

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Unlock the power of our HUMAN Brand™ insights model for enhanced patient, team member, and care provider experiences: https://fidelumhealth.com/

Learn how Planetree can help your organization deliver person-centered care at: https://www.planetree.org/

In this episode of Humanizing Healthcare, we speak with Jennifer Bright, CEO of International Consortium for Health Outcomes Measurement (ICHOM), about what healthcare value really means and confront a question that challenges how most systems operate:

Are we measuring what actually helps patients get better, or just what’s easy to count?

Healthcare has become very good at tracking processes. But as Jennifer explains, many of the things we label as “outcomes” are actually tasks we do to or for patients. Screenings, follow-ups, time-to-needle. Important, yes. But they’re not results.

Jennifer shares how ICHOM works with health systems around the world to define and use patient-centered outcome measures that reflect real results. She explains why survival alone does not tell the full story, why mental health and functional recovery matter, and why value must be defined by improvement in people’s lives.

If we’re serious about humanizing healthcare, value has to mean improvement in people’s lives. This conversation pushes us to live up to that standard.

🎧 Take a listen.

Key Takeaways

Introduction (00:00)

Jennifer’s personal journey into patient advocacy (02:43)

From lived experience to healthcare system reform (06:27)

What ICHOM does and how it was founded (09:04)

Why measuring patient outcomes took so long (12:35)

What measuring outcomes looks like in practice (19:04)

Misconceptions about outcomes and what patients value (26:16)

Additional Resources

ICHOM website: https://www.ichom.org/

ICHOM LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/international-consortium-for-health-outcomes-measurement-ichom-/

Jennifer Bright’s LinkedIn Page: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jenniferbrightmhs/

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Story Submission Link for New Book: https://forms.gle/32juxZ7aYFSuugBi7

Fidelum Health LinkedIn Page: https://www.linkedin.com/company/fidelum-health/

Planetree LinkedIn Page: https://www.linkedin.com/company/planetree/

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Unlock the power of our HUMAN Brand™ insights model for enhanced patient, team member, and care provider experiences: https://fidelumhealth.com/

Learn how Planetree can help your organization deliver person-centered care at: https://www.planetree.org/

We are pleased to share a new episode of Humanizing Healthcare featuring Rafael Cohen, Chief Executive Officer at Pacifica Salud Hospitals.

In this conversation, Rafael shares how Pacifica Salud has built a culture of person-centered care rooted in leadership, dignity, and humanity, even in the most complex and high-pressure moments.

From rethinking hospital environments to making courageous policy decisions during COVID-19, Rafael offers real-world examples of what it looks like when healthcare organizations put people first, not just in principle, but in practice.

Together, we explore how values-driven leadership shapes patient experience, supports care teams, and leads to better outcomes for everyone involved.

🎧 Hit play to hear how leadership choices can transform care, especially when it matters most.

Key Takeaways

Introduction (00:00)

Why Person-Centered Care Matters (02:05)

Designing Healing Environments for Dignity (08:55)

Policy Decisions That Changed Outcomes (11:45)

Balancing Care, Community, and Global Patients (15:05)

When Crisis Reveals Culture (23:20)

Advice for Leaders: Humanity First (32:35)

Additional Resources

Guest: Rafael Cohen’s LinkedIn Page: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rafael-cohen-1926901b/

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Story Submission Link for New Book: https://forms.gle/32juxZ7aYFSuugBi7

Fidelum Health LinkedIn Page: https://www.linkedin.com/company/fidelum-health/

Planetree LinkedIn Page: https://www.linkedin.com/company/planetree/

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Unlock the power of our HUMAN Brand™ insights model for enhanced patient, team member, and care provider experiences: https://fidelumhealth.com/

Learn how Planetree can help your organization deliver person-centered care at: https://www.planetree.org/

Dwight McBee is back for round two on the Humanizing Healthcare podcast, and we can assure you that you'll want to hear what he’s been up to.

As Chief Experience Officer at RWJBarnabas Health, Dwight is leading some seriously bold work around making care more compassionate, more responsive, and more human.

We discuss how he’s helping an entire health system listen in real time, how he views AI as a tool, and why the small, everyday moments are often the ones that matter most.

Dwight shares the strategies that his team is using to make change last, why flashy new initiatives can be a trap, and how storytelling is one of the most powerful tools in a leader’s toolkit.

🎧 Hit play and get inspired by a leader who is living it.

Key Takeaways

Introduction (00:00)

Dwight Mcbee's journey into healthcare (03:27)

Technology and listening in healthcare (10:34)

Sustaining patient experience initiatives (16:39)

Magnifying the mundane (19:51)

Balancing patient and provider experience (22:04)

Future of the chief experience officer role (24:48)

Advice for aspiring leaders (28:38)

Additional Resources

Dwight McBee’s LinkedIn Page: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dwmcbee/

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Story Submission Link for New Book: https://forms.gle/32juxZ7aYFSuugBi7

Fidelum Health LinkedIn Page: https://www.linkedin.com/company/fidelum-health/

Planetree LinkedIn Page: https://www.linkedin.com/company/planetree/

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Unlock the power of our HUMAN Brand™ insights model for enhanced patient, team member, and care provider experiences: https://fidelumhealth.com/

Learn how Planetree can help your organization deliver person-centered care at: https://www.planetree.org/