NRC Health HUB26 Healthcare Conference: What World-Class CX Can Teach Healthcare Leaders

Patients compare every interaction to the best experience they’ve had anywhere. They don’t separate healthcare from retail, travel, banking, or hospitality when they’re deciding whether an experience felt easy, personal, and trustworthy. 

That’s why NRC Health’s Human Understanding Beyond | HUB26 healthcare conference includes a session that brings lessons from world-class consumer brands directly into healthcare.  

Led by leaders from Piedmont Healthcare and SpurConnX, this session explores how proven customer experience strategies can strengthen patient trust, deepen listening, and create more consistent human-centered experiences.  

Join us in Nashville, September 2–4. Register today!

Healthcare leaders can learn that the principles behind great experiences are remarkably consistent across industries. 

At HUB26, Elizabeth Daugherty, Founder and Principal Consultant of SpurConnX, and Douwe Bergsma, Chief Growth Officer at Piedmont Healthcare, will share perspectives shaped by leadership roles with organizations including Delta Air Lines, American Express, Georgia-Pacific, Procter & Gamble, and The Home Depot. Their message is straightforward: organizations earn trust when they listen closely, understand people deeply, and act consistently.  

The session examines how leading consumer organizations use experience design, feedback loops, and cross-functional collaboration to deliver on their brand promise.  

Healthcare leaders can apply those same disciplines while honoring the unique responsibilities of patient care.

Piedmont Healthcare is applying proven consumer experience strategies to strengthen patient experience while maintaining high-quality care with safety at its core.  

During the session, attendees will learn how the health system listens to patients, caregivers, and frontline teams and translates those insights into meaningful action.  

The result is an approach designed to build trust, strengthen loyalty, and create experiences that reflect what people value most.  

The discussion will explore how organizations can: 

• Use experience strategy to deliver on brand promises 
• Build trust and affinity with patients and communities 
• Harness patient listening and closed-loop feedback 
• Break down silos that limit collaboration and improvement 

For hospital and health system leaders, the value lies in practical application. 

Patient listening remains a leadership priority because understanding people is the foundation of improving experiences. 

One of the session’s learning objectives focuses on harnessing patient listening and closed-loop feedback to inform decisions.  

Rather than collecting feedback and moving on, the discussion will explore how leading organizations transform insight into action. The strongest organizations don’t simply collect feedback—they create systems that help teams hear, understand, and respond. 

How Can Healthcare Organizations Break Down Experience Silos? 

Healthcare organizations can break down experience silos by connecting insights across departments and aligning teams around shared goals. 

The session identifies collaboration as a key component of delivering better outcomes. When marketing, operations, clinical teams, digital experience leaders, and frontline staff work from a shared understanding of patient needs, organizations can move from isolated improvements to coordinated action. 

Patient experience, employee experience, and community trust are deeply connected. Improving one often strengthens the others. 

That is one of the session’s most important observations: people experience an organization as one organization, not a collection of departments. 

HUB26 provides healthcare leaders with practical strategies, peer connections, and real-world examples from organizations advancing human-centered care. 

The conference brings together hundreds of healthcare leaders from across the country for keynote presentations, breakout sessions, networking opportunities, and focused discussions on the challenges shaping healthcare experience today. 

Attendees can explore topics including: 

• Patient experience 
• Employee and workforce experience 
• Community engagement 
• Consumer experience and innovation  

The event’s format is intentionally designed to help leaders move beyond theory and into action, with sessions led by experienced healthcare executives and industry experts who are tackling these challenges every day.  

Join Us at HUB26 

Join healthcare leaders from across the country at HUB26, the healthcare conference for human-centered leaders, September 2–4, 2026, in Nashville, Tennessee.  

Explore practical strategies, learn from peers, and discover how Human Understanding helps organizations create better experiences for patients, associates, and communities. 

Register today!