At Ochsner Health, opportunities to enhance a department’s patient experience results are always thoughtfully considered with a parallel review of team member engagement scores in that same area.
“We know that when team members are struggling, our patients may feel the struggle as well,” said Alison Soileau, PhD, vice president of patient experience and service excellence at Ochsner Health.
By connecting the patient and employee experience teams and data, Ochsner fosters collaboration to tackle cultural challenges to make meaningful, lasting change.
As a nonprofit health system in the Gulf South, Ochsner Health operates 47 hospitals and more than 370 health and urgent care centers. Ochsner Health is part of the AMA Health System Member Program, which provides enterprise solutions to equip leadership, physicians and care teams with resources to help drive the future of medicine.
Dyad-inspired partnerships
Ochsner’s longstanding dyad leadership model integrates clinical expertise with operational business strategy, emphasizing partnership, collaboration, and balance.
“The dyad leadership model, which pairs a physician leader with an administrative leader, has worked beautifully at Ochsner,” said Soileau.
Understanding the powerful connection between how employees experience their work and how patients experience their care, Soileau’s patient experience team has adopted a similar partnership structure to break down silos and align around shared goals with the employee experience team.
Soileau, as system vice president of patient experience and service excellence at Ochsner Health, has a dyad partner in Nicole Pepitone, system vice president of employee experience and human resources strategy. To formalize this partnership, the two leaders brought their teams together for an all-day strategy session focused on relationship-building, resource alignment, and idea-sharing.
“We ensured the employee experience and patient experience teams knew their regional partners so they could collaborate effectively with frontline leaders,” said Pepitone.
The strategy session went beyond operational alignment, fostering a deeper understanding of each team’s role and value within the organization.
“We discussed what each of us does daily, how to help leaders drive behavior changes, and how to identify and address barriers,” Soileau explained.
A key focus was aligning on how to use shared data to drive meaningful impact.
“There’s a lot of emotion in our data, so we share it broadly, learn from it, and create a unified plan,” said Soileau. “Instead of separate employee and patient experience plans, we now have one cohesive approach.”
This shift from parallel workstreams to a unified strategy has been transformative.
“We’re no longer operating in isolated bubbles of employee and patient experience,” said Soileau. “We’re working together to help others see that it’s all about the human experience.”
The teams now meet regularly to ensure transparency, share data and maintain accountability. These sessions allow them to connect insights across their areas of expertise. For instance, when a department shows improvement in patient experience, the teams analyze employee experience factors that may have contributed to the success. This approach helps identify scalable best practices and patterns across the organization.
Building a cultural foundation
For Ochsner, cultivating the right culture became a defining priority in 2022, following a leadership transition. This pivotal moment offered an opportunity to reimagine the organization’s strategy and priorities, ultimately leading to a redesigned culture that aligned with its goals.
“Culture is at our center because it shapes the behaviors that drive outcomes,” said Pepitone.
This transformation strategy was a collaborative effort involving teams across the organization, including human resources, patient experience, employee experience, physicians, nurses, and others. The work to create a unified culture that supports both team members and patients is ongoing.
“We’re building a foundation of trust, psychological safety, caring communication, and empowered teams,” Pepitone explained. “These elements help us foster a culture of belonging and excellence.”
A key milestone in bringing this vision to life occurred during last spring’s senior leadership retreat, which brought together approximately 300 leaders from across the organization. The retreat began with a discussion of Unreasonable Hospitality, a book that explores how organizations can transform ordinary transactions into extraordinary experiences. Author Will Guidara spoke at the event, inspiring Ochsner’s leaders to reframe their approach to work and service excellence.
Building on this inspiration, teams explored the behaviors needed to elevate the healthcare experience for patients and employees. Leaders participated in breakout sessions to identify the key behaviors that would shape Ochsner Health’s culture moving forward.
“Together, we determined which behaviors were most essential for the culture we wanted to create,” said Soileau. “From there, we brought these agreed-upon behaviors to the frontline, where they could have a meaningful impact on the people we serve.”
One of the behaviors is the 10/5 rule, which is simply to show up for people—warmly and visibly. At Ochsner, the expectation is to smile and make eye contact with others within 10 feet and verbally acknowledge them within five feet.
The results of these efforts have been remarkable. For example, the patient and employee experience teams tracked how often patients used the word “kind” in surveys to describe their interactions with Ochsner Health physicians and care teams. Between Q1 and Q4 of 2025, survey mentions of “kind” increased by an impressive 40%.
An emerging, integrated journey mapping approach
As part of their evolving partnership, Ochsner Health’s patient and employee experience teams are beginning to take a more integrated approach to journey mapping—recognizing that the dual experiences of care and work are deeply interconnected.
Rather than treating patient and employee journeys as separate efforts, the teams are intentionally exploring how insights from both can be viewed together to better understand shared friction points across the human experience.
“This is new work for us,” said Pepitone. “We’re early in aligning how we look at patient and team member journeys together, but we believe that better work drives better patient experience.”
The focus today is on learning, listening closely to feedback, comparing patterns across patient comments, engagement data, and frontline insights, and identifying where breakdowns in processes or behaviors affect both patients and care teams.
“We’re asking different questions now,” said Soileau. “Where are our patients feeling frustration, and what might be happening for the people delivering the care? Those connections aren’t always obvious unless you look at the data—and the stories—together.”
By using journey mapping as a shared lens, the teams aim to build a more complete picture of how work gets done and how care is experienced. Over time, this approach is expected to help leaders prioritize the right improvements, remove systemic barriers for care teams, and design processes that support team member experience, well-being and high-quality patient care.
“We’re confident the work starts by understanding the experience more deeply—then designing solutions with our people and patients in mind,” said Pepitone.
Strengthening physician engagement
This integrated strategy has also opened new doors for supporting physicians. By connecting patient and employee experience efforts, the teams have been able to focus on what matters most to physicians—from fostering engagement within clinical teams to enhancing individual performance on patient metrics.
“We’ve created a psychologically safe environment where these partnerships can receive coaching, have honest conversations, and adjust how they engage to drive better outcomes,” Soileau explained.
This work is part of Ochsner’s broader commitment to physician well-being. The organization measures burnout with the AMA’s Organizational Biopsy®, and it has earned Gold-level recognition from the AMA’s Joy in Medicine® Health System Recognition Program every year since 2019.
The organization’s high physician engagement scores are inevitably reflected in their patients’ experiences, as well. In fact, in the past year and a half, the net promoter score that patients give their physicians increased from 89 to 92, and more than 100 Ochsner physicians received a score of 100 last year.
“To move the needle that significantly shows that our clinicians are having better days at work. And our patients are feeling the difference,” Soileau said.
Prioritizing listening
At the heart of Ochsner Health’s approach is a shared commitment to listening—listening to patients, physicians, employees and all members of the care team.
“We believe that the basic human needs are to be heard, valued, and respected,” said Soileau. “That belief is the foundation of the work that unites us.”
Whether it’s understanding patients’ needs and frustrations or addressing employees’ challenges and concerns, the focus is on ensuring every voice is heard—and then taking meaningful action.
For patients, Soileau and her team launched a structured listening initiative aimed at addressing negative feedback from patient surveys. Ochsner receives over 400,000 patient comments annually, and while the majority are positive, the organization made a deliberate decision to focus on the approximately 8,000 negative comments received last year.
Each week, the patient experience team sent executive leaders an overview of negative feedback received from patients. The email included the patient’s name, phone number, and comment, with a request for leaders to personally contact these patients to acknowledge their concerns and ensure they felt heard.
“We realized our patients were pointing out broken processes, and we wanted them to know we were listening,” said Soileau. “This initiative has taught us so much and has become one of the most impactful feedback loops we’ve implemented.”
This approach not only reinforces accountability but also creates opportunities for real-time improvements. “It allowed us to recover service by learning from the feedback and fixing what frustrates our patients,” Soileau added.
Similarly, Ochsner recognized that employees are often the first to identify inefficiencies and issues—sometimes even before patients notice them.
“While patients may recognize when a process is broken or there’s a service delivery issue, the people closest to the work often see and feel those issues first,” said Pepitone.
Ochsner developed True North Councils to gather insights by uniting employees and frontline leaders across roles, departments, and regions. These councils address systemic issues, shape workplace and patient care and drive meaningful change. Alongside systemwide councils, Ochsner also established regional, physician, and Advanced Practice Provider councils for robust feedback.
“The councils are designed to shape and inform the work, the workplace, and patient care settings,” said Pepitone. “They help identify systemic issues before they escalate and play a key role in driving meaningful change. Conversations happen year-round and directly influence quality, access, and experience.”
By prioritizing listening, Ochsner fosters a culture of accountability, collaboration, and continuous improvement, ensuring patients and employees feel valued. This approach, combined with innovative leadership and engagement programs, creates a more connected and responsive system focused on enhancing the human experience.
