Your Brand Promise Might Be Broken: How to Align Brand and Patient Experience in Healthcare

By Brian Wynne, Senior Vice President, NRC Health 

If you work in healthcare marketing or experience, you’ve seen this gap up close. You say one thing in your campaigns, but patients feel something else when they actually engage with your organization. 

You might talk about ease, compassion, or trust. Then a patient runs into friction, confusion, or silence, and the patient experience is impacted. 

If that disconnect feels familiar, you’re not alone.  

Here’s how to align brand and patient experience in healthcare, and what you can take away from Piedmont Healthcare’s approach. 

Here’s what you’ll walk away with: 

• Why your brand and patient experience fall out of sync 
• How listening reshapes your strategy 
• What to fix in your measurement approach 
• How to align your teams across silos 
• Where data helps and where it doesn’t 

Get this right, and you don’t just improve experiences. You build trust that lasts. 

You probably spend a lot of time shaping your brand. You choose your words carefully. You define what you stand for. 

Then reality kicks in. 

Your promise has to show up across departments, roles, and thousands of daily interactions. That’s where things slip. You might be promising seamless access while scheduling delays pile up. Your frontline teams might care deeply, but lack the tools to deliver what you’ve promised. 

During a special mainstage session we hosted at HMPS26, Douwe Bergsma, Chief Brand Growth Officer at Piedmont Healthcare, put it plainly: “How much of the experience is aligned to the expectations that you set?” 

Here’s the thing: silos make consistency almost impossible. 

“We talk a lot in healthcare about having a lot of silos,” Bergsma said. “You’ve got the physicians over here…and marketing communications on the side of everything.” 

If you want alignment, you have to close those gaps.

Elizabeth Daugherty, Principal Strategy Partner for Piedmont Healthcare, didn’t start with a campaign. 

She started with listening. 

When she joined Piedmont, she spoke with more than 50 people across the organization: frontline staff, leaders, and executives. She wanted to understand what it actually felt like to deliver care. 

And that’s where the insights came from, into what’s broken, why it frustrates people, and where things don’t connect. 

“If you listen to the people that we serve, and you are curious to understand, that’s where it all starts,” said Daugherty. 

What this means for you: you need to hear what’s really happening on the ground, not just what shows up in reports. 

And when you hear it, act. 

“Tell me honestly what is getting in the way of providing that service,” Daugherty said. “And let’s just start taking care of those things.” 

Healthcare tends to manage moments. Your patients experience journeys. 

Bergsma and Daugherty brought a different perspective from companies like Delta and Procter & Gamble, where experience works as a system. 

That shift matters. 

Your patients don’t separate your website, your call center, and the clinical visit. It all blends into one experience. When one piece breaks, the whole perception changes. 

“A great experience has to show up in every single touchpoint consistently,” said Daugherty. “People can feel it. They have to believe it.” 

If your experience doesn’t feel real, your brand won’t either. 

Measurement often creates friction instead of clarity. 

Your teams likely feel it already. You measure them on outcomes they don’t control or fully understand. A nurse gets scored on satisfaction tied to wait times. Your marketing team owns promises they can’t influence. 

At Piedmont, teams said they felt like they were “being measured on things that they were failing on.” 

That disconnect slows progress fast. 

So, they changed the model. They aligned metrics across teams and tied them to shared outcomes. 

When people saw how their work mattered, things started to shift. Conversations got clearer. Teams focused on what they could actually improve. 

“You need dissatisfaction with the current situation, alignment to a vision, and a reason for action,” said Bergsma. 

Your measurement approach should support all three. 

You can’t fix the patient experience if your teams stay disconnected. 

Session moderator Ryan Donohue, CEO of Golden Advisory, called it out: “Sometimes we don’t trust ourselves on the inside across departments.” 

That lack of trust shows up quickly. You see hesitation, miscommunication, and missed handoffs. 

“You have to believe it. You have to know that you’re doing good,” emphasized Daugherty. “And have the autonomy to deliver that experience.” 

What this means for you: alignment goes beyond org charts. It shows up in how your teams work together every day. 

When your people understand the goal and trust each other, everything moves faster.

Your data only works if you use it. 

Once Piedmont saw performance clearly, conversations shifted. 

“It became a business conversation, because we had the metrics and the insights,” Bergsma said. 

That clarity made it easier to stop doing things that didn’t work and invest in what did. 

Daugherty put it bluntly: you have to be “ruthless with what you need to keep doing, what you need to stop, and how you spend your team energy wisely.” 

Here’s the difference: your data shouldn’t just explain what happened. It should help you decide what to do next. 

If you want to close the gap between what you promise and what your patients feel, start here: 

• Listen to your patients and your employees, and take it seriously 
• Bring your teams together across marketing, operations, and clinical care 
• Align your metrics so everyone works toward the same outcomes 
• Give your teams clarity, trust, and room to act 
• Use your data to guide decisions and prioritize impact 

 The Bottom Line 

You don’t struggle with experience because you don’t care. You struggle because your systems don’t support consistency. Fix that, and everything starts to line up. 

You don’t build alignment with better messaging. You build it by making sure your brand shows up the same way, everywhere. 

When your teams move together, your patients feel it. 

And that’s when your brand becomes something people actually believe.