Key Takeaways from HUB25: Human Understanding Is Transforming Healthcare Leadership, Culture, and Patient Experience

Learn how to operationalize compassion and empathy, empower teams, leverage consumer insights, and standardize experiences for better outcomes.

NRC Health’s Human Understanding Beyond | HUB25 brought healthcare leaders, innovators, and changemakers together to examine a shared purpose: elevating Human Understanding as the foundation for better care.

Through rich concurrent sessions spanning leadership, culture, patient experience, consumer insights, and clinical strategy, attendees explored how empathy, data, and operational excellence can converge to create real transformation.

What emerged from HUB25 was a clear and compelling message: human-centered care succeeds when organizations unify strategy, empower their people, listen deeply to patients, and embed experience thinking into every layer of operations.

Key Takeaways from HUB25

• Experience operations are essential, not optional. Patient experience must be embedded into clinical workflows, leadership priorities, and administrative processes—not siloed in one department. This operational approach drives consistency and compassion across care settings. 
• Culture is a strategic driver of outcomes. When employees feel connected to purpose and supported by leadership, patient experience improves. Initiatives that foster joy, trust, and psychological safety create measurable gains in engagement and care quality. 
• Empowering the frontline transforms care. Real-time, voluntary feedback tools like NRC Health’s nGage enable staff to own their development, shifting from top-down measurement to self-driven growth and accountability. 
• Consumer insights fuel smarter decisions. Aligning marketing and operations around shared data helps organizations uncover unmet needs and accelerate improvements across the patient journey. 
• Standardization enables scale. Large systems succeed when they unify measurement, goals, and accountability—creating a cohesive experience strategy that spans multiple hospitals and service lines.

A defining theme at HUB25 was the growing strategic importance of experience operations. Attendees repeatedly emphasized that patient experience can no longer be viewed as a single department’s responsibility—it must be operationalized across clinical teams, administrative workflows, and leadership priorities. 

One standout example came from Atrium Health Levine Children’s Hospital, where Clay Locklear and Kimberly Ortmayer illustrated how blending clinical services with child life, art and music therapy, Seacrest Studios, and family advisory programs creates a seamlessly unified care model. Their approach showed how collaboration between clinical and non-clinical departments reduces fragmentation, eases the burden on staff, and leads to more consistent, compassionate experiences for children and families. 

Similarly, UCHealth’s human-centered design leaders, Heidi Culloton and Stewart Trask, challenged the idea that design thinking is too experimental for healthcare. They demonstrated how small, iterative design pilots build trust with leaders, surface meaningful insights, and create scalable change. Their work showed that when teams are empowered to co-create solutions alongside patients and staff, culture shifts from cautious to innovative. 

Prisma Health’s Tina Hunter added a systems-based lens, emphasizing that patient experience is inseparable from safety and clinical quality. Her focus on evidence-based nursing, standard work, and coaching reinforced the importance of consistent, reliable practices across departments. When experience becomes part of the operational fabric and not just a metric, it drives better outcomes for patients and teams. 

Across these sessions, the message was clear: Experience operations are no longer optional—they are essential to delivering consistent, high-quality, human-centered care.

The Leadership & Culture track highlighted how profoundly an organization’s internal environment shapes the care patients receive. When employees feel supported, valued, and connected to purpose, that energy naturally extends to the bedside. 

One of the most energizing sessions came from Brown University Health’s Jeni Mowry and Elizabeth Sarkis, whose presentation “When Is It Okay to Use the F-Word at Work? When the F-word Is FUN!” revealed the deep connection between joy and performance. They shared how activities and events designed to create moments of levity and community not only boost morale, but also lead to measurable improvements in patient experience. NRC Health data further demonstrated that engaged employees are more likely to drive stronger Net Promoter Scores, underscoring the power of culture in shaping outcomes. 

Nemours Children’s Health leaders Dr. Peggy Greco and Kaitlin Danzig added another dimension by focusing on partnership. Their “Speak Up” initiative is redefining what it means to involve patients and families in safety efforts. By empowering families to voice concerns, ask questions, and participate in decision-making, Nemours is reducing preventable harm and deepening trust at every step of the care journey. 

Rhonda Fisher of Harris Health shared how culture-building begins on day one. By integrating patient experience curriculum into unit-based orientation, Harris Health ensures that every employee—clinical or non-clinical—understands their role in delivering compassionate care. Early alignment around human-centered values sets the tone for more consistent, confident, and engaged teams. 

Together, these sessions illustrated that culture is not a soft concept; it is a strategic driver that shapes both employee experience and patient outcomes.

Frontline staff play a defining role in every patient encounter, and HUB25 attendees explored new ways to support, develop, and empower those teams. 

Lehigh Valley Health Network shared how NRC Health’s cross-journey listening is transforming frontline engagement by enabling staff to voluntarily request feedback on their own interactions. Instead of relying solely on retrospective survey data tied to clinical encounters, nGage provides personalized insights that help individuals grow in real time. This shift from top-down measurement to voluntary, self-driven learning represents a powerful cultural evolution. 

By giving frontline teams agency over their development, organizations cultivate ownership, accountability, and pride, qualities that ultimately strengthen the patient experience.

Many organizations struggle to turn consumer data into actionable change—but HUB25 offered compelling examples of how to bridge that gap. 

Virtua Health leaders Meagan Mackerer and Hester Villanueva showed how aligning marketing and operations creates a powerful engine for improvement. By combining survey data, online reviews, and market research, their teams uncovered unmet needs related to access, communication, and expectations. Because marketing understood the “why” behind consumer behavior and operations understood the “how” of care delivery, the partnership accelerated improvements across the patient journey. 

This model demonstrated how consumer insights, when shared across departments, fuel smarter decisions and more responsive care delivery.

Large health systems face unique challenges in aligning expectations and delivering consistent patient experiences. Mass General Brigham offered a look into how standardization can support meaningful change at scale. By streamlining more than 100 question pods into a unified survey structure and partnering with NRC Health for transparent reporting, the system created a cohesive patient experience strategy across twelve hospitals. 

Their work underscored the value of standardized measurement, clearer benchmarking, unified goals, and shared accountability across the enterprise.

Across the Clinical Strategies track, leaders emphasized that clinical excellence and compassionate care are inseparable. Speakers, including Pantea Vahidi of Compassion Clinic, highlighted ways to integrate empathy into clinical workflows without sacrificing efficiency or quality. Their work showed how skills such as communication, relational awareness, and emotional support elevate both outcomes and trust.

HUB25 made one thing clear: the future of healthcare depends on our ability to understand people—patients, families, and employees—as human beings first.

Whether through operational alignment, leadership behaviors, collaborative design, consumer intelligence, or compassionate clinical care, every session pointed to the same conclusion: Human Understanding is not an initiative. It is the strategy.

The conversations at HUB25 will continue to influence care delivery long after the event, inspiring organizations to create environments where people feel seen, heard, and valued at every touchpoint.

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