NRC Health’s 29th annual conference, Human Understanding Beyond | HUB23, is set to take place August 9–11, 2023, in Boston. The event will cover innovative solutions for personalizing care, empowering caregivers, and restoring the human connection between patients and providers.

HUB23 is designed to bring motivating messages, thoughtful discussions, moving experiences, and unprecedented networking connections to assist your executive leadership, PX, and marketing teams.

This year’s conference will include new custom tracks:

• Fundamentals first: Learn the essentials health systems need to move the dial within patient experience.
• Expanded executive track: Understand strategic opportunities and challenges at the C-suite level.
• Marketing/consumer track: Discover NRC Health’s Human Understanding Program’s marketing capabilities.
• Poster sessions: Share patient-experience research, case-study results, and valuable insights to improve the human experience in healthcare.

Below you’ll find a preview of the presentations in the Fundamentals First Track.

Fundamentals First Breakout Sessions:

“The Art of Leadership Rounding: Influencing and Inquiring about Experiences,” presented by the Nobl and Wellstar Health team of Jason Rau, Chief Growth Officer, and Katie Haifley, CPXP, Co-Founder COO/CMO of Nobl; and Dana Caviness, Assistant Vice President of Patient Experience Operations at Wellstar Health System. 

Leadership rounding on patients is a best practice, but the soft skills behind the practice are often overlooked. Mastering the skills behind a purposeful round involves inquiring about but gently influencing the experience. In this session, we will explore how rounders can move beyond using leadership rounding as a surveying method to using it as a daily practice that builds relationships with patients, creates a positive impression, and moves the needle on patient-experience scores. Learn what behaviors and activities master rounders use to drive change, discover unique ways in which leading organizations use their rounding data for improvement, and apply tactics to improve HCAHPS from leadership rounds. 

“Partner With Me—Heathier Happens Together,” presented by the Hawai’i Pacific team of Bryce Watanabe, Director of Patient Experience; Alison Zecha, Director of Organizational Effectiveness; Xuchyll Ann Roman, Quality Improvement Program Manager; Dr. Shilpa Patel, Chief Quality Officer; and Toya Gorley, Improvement Advisor, NRC Health. 

At Hawai’i Pacific Health (HPH), intentional collaboration enables a shift away from the protocol-driven workflows of a COVID world to a renewed focus on relationships with and within the organization. “Healthier Happens Together” is an HPH internal campaign designed to reframe how we think about care delivery and our intentional investment in relationships at HPH: Caring for Patients (patient experience), Caring for You (our employees), and Caring for Each other (our culture). Learn how to address burnout and engagement among caregivers and staff, evaluate the impact of silos on your organization’s culture, and find opportunities to create empowering connections and improve patient-care outcomes and the experience of care on both sides of the stethoscope, with a focus on relationships. 

“Evidence that Empathy Education Improves the Patient Experience and Reduces Clinician Burnout,” presented by Helen Riess, MD, Founder and CEO, Empathetics, Inc.; Associate Professor of Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School; and Psychiatrist, Massachusetts General Hospital.

Dr. Riess will describe the mutual benefit of a scalable, evidence-based empathy education intervention for patients, clinicians, and frontline staff. Proven through years of research on the neuroscience of empathy, these techniques raise the patient-experience ratings of healthcare professionals and frontline staff while reducing burnout by tapping into the well of human caring and resilience. Learn about the multiple domains in which empathy education improves healthcare delivery and outcomes, discover why leaders who prioritize humanism in healthcare will have the most successful organizations, and see how investing in self-empathy improves healthcare for all stakeholders. 

“Children’s Hospital Los Angeles Patient Experience Strategic Roadmap: Improvement Structure, Oversight, Accountability,” presented by the Children’s Hosptial Los Angeles team of Lisa Schiller, MS, CPXP, Director, Office of Patient Experience; and Gwen Webster, St. Analyst Patient Experience.   

In this presentation, Children’s Hospital Los Angeles will share tangible ways to design an accountability structure around goal setting, with an approach to achieve success, including a detailed overview of their enterprise-wide approach to engaging leaders throughout the hospital and medical group. Learn how to identify successful strategies by creating an accountability platform and discover best practices for driving performance in ambulatory care and emergency department settings.   

“Human Understanding in Practice,” Presented by the Nemours Children’s Health team of Peggy Greco, Ph.D., Chief Patient Experience Officer, Nemours Children’s; and Daria Young, Patient Experience Partner-Clinical.   

Understanding each unique individual is essential to recognizing needs, building a trusting relationship, and offering high-quality, truly personalized health care. NRC Health has developed a number of tools that help you capture and act on what matters most to each patient. Learn from Nemours Children’s Health’s initiative aimed at treating each patient as a unique person as well as better understand demographic variations based on patient experience data from a variety of sources as well as the implications of these variations for health outcomes. And design a plan to optimize Human Understanding within the constraints of your setting. 

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