We're at the NRC health symposium, we're in Nashville, we are this is in person, Jennifer, this is a pretty big moment for us. You are the first podcast guest we've had in person. Wow this is so great. It feels strange because it's been so long. It's a good stretch. It's a welcome stretch. So speaking of strange, Ryan Donahue of solutions expert and AJ faculty member, Brian Wynne, VP at NRC health, we're so pleased to welcome Jennifer baron, chief experience officer of Uc Davis Health. We love your organization. We love what you do. We've been following you and your career for a while. We're so glad to have you. Thank you. Thank you for having me. I'm honored that I'm the first in person guest and incredibly grateful to be here. We wanted to center this conversation primarily around the idea, the concept of human understanding. We talk about it in our health all the time. And I talk about on the podcast all the time. It's very simply the idea that every person has a unique story and a unique set of circumstances, a unique set of expectations. And it's really our duty as health care providers and the health care industry to listen to understand that story and design experiences around them. You're a cxo. You live and breathe this work all the time. Like talk to us a little bit about what human understanding means to you and how you take that to work every day. Absolutely human understanding to me really is what you just articulated. It's about seeing people as fellow human beings, seeing people as more than in health care. Oftentimes, people come in, they're already suffering. They're coming to us for help. And we're really good at getting to what's going on with that person. But we don't always take the time to understand what's meaningful to that person, as a human being and what their life looks like outside of the walls of our organizations. And that's really important information for us to have because they come to us for a brief period of time, some people more extended than others, but they eventually go home. They go back to their families, their friends, their communities, to the things that matter to them. And if they're going home and managing a disease or an illness or something of that nature, all of those components of who they are and what's meaningful to them and their personal life goals are things that we need to understand. So that they can best manage whatever their care plan is for their health. And I love the way you say that, Jennifer. I'm sure, though, for people listening, you've got experience in your title. You're thinking about the experience. And I think our listeners, if they were to picture right now an experience in a health care world, they're picturing someone in a gown right there focused on throughput and satisfaction and all of those things that we get tied up in. But I love the way you framed it as the before and the after. Tell me a little bit more about how you've been able to make that shift. How are you able to bust out of just that traditional in the four walls health care experience as the only part of the experience? I think it's an ongoing conversation, sure. For all of us, it is constant evolution. And I worked in health care for 28 years and I've lived and breathed it almost every day of my professional career. And I think what we often do in health care is we fix a problem and then we consider it fixed and we don't think about the fact that we have to constantly evolve. And so we have to go back and check on it to evolve through it. So I think is an experienced leader, that conversation is one of continuing to elevate the stories of the people we serve, reminding people of the human side of those people and again, not just the clinical side. They come to us for clinical care, but they want to be seen as who they are as a person. It's really about leading that conversation. It's about how we're telling the stories, how we are even personalizing the letters that we get. So I've been working on a lot of that at Uc Davis Health and really connecting our teams back to our promise of putting the patients at the center of everything we do. And so a lot of it is not just in the what, but it's in the art of the how we're lifting that conversation. But I feel like the way you even changed a little bit just to tack on the end of that, because I think sometimes people go down that hole because they're so focused on data. So if all of my data is around caps or is measured from the moment they check in to when they discharge them, then it stops. Whereas I think what you're doing is you're really thinking of their time away is another form of data, what they're doing in their own lives. That story is just as good as the stuff in the chat if you're going to provide them great care when they come in. It absolutely is. And so I've had the opportunity to work with some really fantastic colleagues who we've been able to work as a team to elevate the voice of our patients through the data. And I think that's really important. I'm a big believer in the importance of our qualitative data from our surveys. I think we do tend to get hung up on the quantitative number and how we're performing in certain ways. But to me, I'm always interested in peeling back the curtains of that and really looking at. But what is that telling us that data point? What are people saying about it if we have limited resources? What is the voice of our patient telling us that we need to focus on now to improve experiences? So I've done a lot of work to really elevate that qualitative feedback. We have done journey mapping, which is a great visual tool of the experience and those stories and the feedback. And I have found that particular tool to be really compelling for clinical teams in particular, because in the day to day work that they do, they can't necessarily see how that journey threads together and understand where the pitfalls are and how people are actually feeling in those moments where things don't go as planned. So that visual miss. Finding a way, again, to create a more visual experience and connect people with the human side, that data is really, really important. I actually want to touch quickly on the journey that Ryan a for you, because I know you've done work in identifying the journey map in terms of when a customer considers himself a consumer versus when they considered themselves a patient. We're trying to have this longitudinal understanding of one's journey with us, probably, in point of fact, like the journey never ends, like they might have 10 different types of episodes of care with you, but that's all of their longitudinal engagement with your brand. So I would say once the health care journey begins for any reason, it's not over till it's over. So that's sort of the journey. So we have to understand it. But talk to us a little bit about that work that you've done, as you've identified from the consumer's mouth, when they believe they are a patient and when they are considered themselves, they are in control of their choices. Consumer exactly. And in the driver's seat, you know, it's similar to Jennifer's situation because we would beg our heads against the wall, talking to groups of physicians, being at the governance institute, talking to CEOs and board chairs. And a lot of them were on board. But we still got the feeling that they thought the experience, the journey, the path, whatever you want to call it, starts when that person walks in the door, especially physicians. It's when they're walking through the door. Now I'm engaging them and we would say they do. So many things right in the world of search. They're searching, they're asking friends, they're on social media. They're in their own head trying to manage the disease on my own. Maybe I'm not sick. Maybe I'm not getting too old. Maybe it's just something else. I just had a poor night's sleep. You know, we had all this data and we didn't have a visualization. We didn't have a picture of it. And so we actually laid out a slide that showed these are all the things that happened, usually in a sequence for the average patient patient to be. There's seven things that happen before you get to the physician. There's eight or nine things that happen before you get to the hospital. It wasn't until we walked that pathway along and showed them how far down the line that they started to lose. Absolutely And I think also what tends to show up on a journey map are those transitions of care, because historically and this is probably also driven by how people are getting hung up in some of the data points, we tend to look at transactions during a health care experience. And so we have leaders who are responsible for a certain transactional area. And so the journey map can really elevate a conversation between leaders and care teams to look at what does that person have to navigate transitioning from this team to that team, from this part of the experience, to that part of the experience and in the journey maps that I have been a part of, you can see kind of that gap of experiences widening always on those transition points. And so that visual again, representation of that also can drive better collaboration and teamwork among your teams as they really understand how they share responsibility for those points of transition across the journey. It's always been interesting talking about improvement, even just local to the patient experience, improvement, space. We have assessments. We're trying to move the needle chasing goals. Every organization has them at every unit, every part of the health system. There's always been this front of the house, back of the house, bit of mentality where maybe the experienced fell down over there. But I was perfect here. And I don't know what happened after they went home or after they went to another part of the health system. That's kind of not my problem. And what you're saying is like, is it a transition? Yes is it a handoff? Yes but it doesn't mean that the work is done right. It has to be a coordinated, consistent effort. Yes and I want to go back to something you said, Brian, in your first question. One more on journey mapping. So you talked about how it's never really a line. At the end of our research, we found it's not like you start another people at the very end. We're saying, no, it wasn't like I said, OK, this is done. I mean, I might be paying for that experience for months or years. Right and that might just roll right into another experience. So, Brian, you've studied loyalty. Yeah, I've heard you talk about bending that back. What would you say to people who are trying to make that dream more of a loop and just align? Right we try to visualize things in linear fashion. Because I think our brains just accept it that way better. It's really much more like an infinity loop. And you're lucky to have people in that infinity loop. That means you're consistently earning them back as a customer, as a patient, family members and those types of things. And we remember every experience collectively becomes a collective mosaic of experiences, and it's applied to all of our expectations going forward. Even if I had a less than terrific experience last time with the position that's associated with this health system, it's still couched collectively in my overall experience. That brand, you can make it up. You can consistently elevate experiences, right? You don't alienate people with a transaction. You alienate people with a series of poor experiences. And so if you consistently demonstrate that you're not listening, then that will catch up to you. If you fall down here and there, but you're consistently demonstrating that you're trying to listen, trying to improve, then they stay in the infinity loop. And that's the goal, right. How does your organization think about that? How do you think about the concept of loyalty and. Being with somebody through their life, through multiple experiences with their families, all those kinds of things like what's the conversation like as you sort of approach that topic? Yes, it is very important, I think, to all health care organizations. It's important to us. Our leadership team is definitely engaged in that conversation around that loyalty. We are starting the conversation around health care journeys, which I think then kind of plays into that, OK, as we're holding people across these journeys that they're having, then how does that impact loyalty and growth? And retention is that's really a measure of growth and retention for a health care system. We are having those conversations. Now I think we have opportunities to have more of those conversations and really elevate the understanding of the loyalty and why that's important. I want to get back to that concept of qualitative feedback, the stories we think there's nothing more powerful, there's no metric as powerful as just asking somebody what's important to them. Everybody, I think, agrees it's a good idea. But you have to do it with technology. You have to do to scale. And you have to organize those sentiments in such a way to where it makes sense. So you're big on stories. How do you share them with the team? Like what are you looking for? What specific elements are you looking for? And then how do you use it to create awareness? I think the elements that I'm looking for really depend on the conversation. One example, we are having a conversation now around how do we better support our physicians in their patient communications. We know we have a lot of great communicators on our physician team and we looked at our patient feedback data to really start to understand and identify who those people are because we get great feedback from our patients around how well we communicate with them. So we developed a new recognition program that is completely based on the voice of our patients. Will you take it from our survey feedback? We call it the diamond doc award. So it's a quarterly award and we're able to identify physicians who have received high feedback marks from our patients around their communication competencies. We've actually had presented two awards to date. We almost doubled the number of awards between the first and the second round of those awards. We actually then list the names of all of those physicians who were recognized by patients and we post them in common areas where physicians are. And so I actually, at the first award event, saw them shaking hands, congratulating each other. I mean, it was really this point of pride. The second round, we started to pull comments in. So as they walked into the room, they're able to see patient comments. So we're really wanting to elevate what does this really look like through our patients lens? And those comments help. Uc Davis health, even before I arrived last year, is a great storytelling organization, we have a dynamic marketing and corporate communications team that's been great at it. Our executive leadership team, they're really good at telling stories. We are again now connecting more of those stories to our patient promise. So kind of centering around that we are in the process of transitioning from being a provider centric to being more patient centric. And so that really is, again, the goal. Last year, during a brief moment between COVID sergius, where we were able to have some in-person leadership meetings, I got up and read a letter that a patient wrote about one of our nurses, and it was really about this nurse who took the time to understand who this person was as a person and go the extra mile to meet their needs as a human being, not just the clinical needs that they had. It was beautifully written. It showed the nurse was fully present with this patient at all times, really attuned to what was important to her. And so he was actually able to attend the leadership meeting and stood next to me as I read the story, and then got a standing ovation. And so it's about going beyond just lifting the words off the paper and connecting it to the people who were involved in that story. And that's really what I try to do with that. So powerful. It sounds like you're doing a great job of humanizing feedback. A lot of times that can get chalked up to being just a score or just a patient comment. But until you sort of read it and make it real, I love the recognition with the Diamondbacks. That's cool. And I love the way you elevate the stories. This is going to flow right into what we talk about symposium. It's actually about humanizing health care. And I think that example of feedback might be only a part of the health system or it might be only something you've done for a short amount of time. But it is powerful. It's going to be a lot of those little humanizing elements that do this. Now, speaking of human journeys, we didn't just go through last year in one place, you made a journey yourself. Yes to an organization. You've got to tell us just a little bit about that move and what it was like during COVID to do that. I actually accepted the position at Uc Davis Health in December of 2019 not knowing, obviously, that we would be moving into a pandemic, had planned to join in April. And so as February, March rolled out, went into this national quarantine in march, just several weeks before I made the journey out to California, it was pretty unsettling. I mean, I think we all have felt unsettled and there were a lot of things that we were uncertain of during that time. But I had made the commitment I believed in. The folks at Uc Davis helped that I had had interactions in, and I knew that that was the right next step in this journey, of this work that I'm doing. What I found uniquely challenging that I think I underestimated because I was born and raised, hujer, my whole life in Indiana and moving to the West coast, which is very different culturally anyways, and I was really prepared for that and ready for that. But what I underestimated was my own loyalty to my own service providers that I had had for decades in Indiana. And so that was. Really scary and I mean, it's obviously I knew I was going to have to find a new doctor and a new dentist, all of the health care providers for me and my family. But I felt like I had folks at Uc Davis Health that would help me with that. Know, I had planned to ask them for recommendations. You have to start over and build new trusting relationships with those service providers. And so particularly during a national shutdown and in quarantine where the interactions were limited. If first time I met my new doctor, we were both masked, I had no idea what she really looked like. It was a barrier to our communication. It was a great experience, but still not what I know it would have been had we not been COVID times. We all went through that. But it's amazing that you've been able to pick up and start this work. I have to ask you about your title. So chief experience officer is a title we hear a lot and there's more of you than there were a decade ago. Right but there's not a lot there's still a lot of organizations that don't have that role or maybe goes by another title. So for listeners out there and any organization who stumbles upon this, if they don't have a cxo right now, why should they add one? All of the reasons we've been talking about during this whole conversation, you know, you have in your organization that is elevating that conversation and that thought process. And as health care is evolving and we know it's evolving. And there are a lot of non-traditional health care providers that are sort of disrupting this industry that we all know and love, you really have to, as an organization, be intentional about understanding how to design meaningful experiences for the people you serve. Period we all expected as consumers in any service industry that we consume, we're silly if we do not believe that they don't have a whole team behind the experiences that we're receiving, designing and making sure that the teams are delivering those experiences as well. So I would say health care is way behind as an industry in that regard, and I'm glad there are more of us starting to appear. I think every health care organization should really have that role. You mentioned something that I think is really important. There's no brand that's functioning as experiencing any growth that isn't intentionally creating the experience that you are having with that brand. Right that's the big opportunity. Right and so how do you balance it? Health care is different. It is nuanced. I'm the last person to give health care hall pass on this, doing the research that we do. But I get it right. I mean, it's high stakes. It's highly personal. It's very intimate. Emotions are heavily involved in health care. So in that way, it's different. How do you as a balance what you know, people are experiencing those experiences they have outside of health care. And then tune that to be health care appropriate, but still with full recognition of the game, has to be like up level every single time you see somebody. Absolutely well, I think first and foremost, it's about being equally understanding of the experiences of the care teams. Right so you really have to when you think of human centered design, it's human centered design, meaning there are humans on both sides that experience the people delivering the experience and the people receiving that experience. So co designing, I think, is an important concept for us to think about and really getting patients and care teams and leaders together to solve some of the breakdowns that we have collectively. I think it is also a huge culture shift and it's about changing mindset. I will never be able to drive enough change at Uc Davis Health on my own or with my team and my colleagues. It's going to take all 15,000 of us who work at Uc Davis Health to really move it forward. One of the conversations that we had. So the first 10 months I was there, we worked on an experience roadmap, which is really a mini strategic plan for how we're going to start thinking about more intentionally and designing experiences. One of the activities we did that really resonated with people that we got a lot of good Intel out of was I asked the folks involved to think about and name a brand that they're loyal to, not health care specific, but really any brand. And we had people who said Tesla had lots of Tesla because the California. Apple came up and we had some local restaurants, Nordstrom's, you know, just kind of really across all industries. And then I asked folks to talk about why they were loyal. And so they talked about the tenets of that brand. Right they talked about how the brand, kind of the rational performance, how to function with their experiences. And we heard a lot about ease and convenience and personalization and making me feel like this big organization really knows who I am as a whole person. And so what was fascinating to me was that regardless of the brand that people were loyal to and how big or how small that brand was, there were common threads in those tenets of what people wanted from an experience. So we took those tenets and we said, let's adopt those. Why wouldn't we want our patients, the people we serve, to have an easy experience, to have a personalized experience, to have an experience where they feel that we as an organization are intuitive to their needs. And so we named as part of our roadmap. These are the tenets that we're going to design around. And then we took it a step further and I asked people to talk about how they felt about their brand, how did it make them feel? The emotion that was really hard for people. I mean, people had a hard time kind of going, how do I feel? I know I feel good, but if I had to put actual words to it, what would it be? So we kind of worked through that. And again, we. All some common threads with that feedback, I feel safe, I feel like I can trust the organization, I'm happy. So we actually then want that next step and defined how we want people who come to Uc Davis Health to feel as their journey through their health care experiences with us. So we now have those named, I think our next opportunity ahead of us as we implement this road map will be then to put that into action and really design around intentionally around this thing. And naming them is half the battle. Brian will remember a couple of years ago, we convened some market insights clients. You know, we'd looked at every dashboard, we looked at every piece of data and qualitative, too. And we had a speaker from brain trust named Darrell Travis. He said, I don't like surveys if they're missing this one question, how did this make you feel? And he wrote a whole book about it, hasn't it? And so we started working that into every facet of Market Insights. But I have to ask, I'm visualizing your board with all those emotions and they're not all positive, right? There's positive and negative. What is the goal? Emotion if 100% of your patients could go through Uc Davis Health and feel this emotion, what would you want that to be? For me, I think it is prepared. That was one thing, because I have talked to a lot of people, I read a lot of comments about people not feeling prepared for their experiences appropriately. And so that it should be a pretty good, easy opportunity for us. Prepared, seen and heard. Doesn't that almost fall along a journey? I mean, I'm prepared to go in, I'm seen I'm connected to in a human way when I'm there and I'm hurt and people want to leave knowing whether it's the left reviews or feedback or someone called and followed up. I want to felt heard afterwards as I reflect back. Yes, I love that. So powerful. There's other emotion. I'm not sure it's emotion. I'm just thinking we're thinking about brands outside of health care. We're the ones that are the very best Tesla, Apple that they have these die hard loyalists. Right they do all those things and make it easy. They make you feel known like when you unpack an iPhone, you feel like you won, like you just spent $1,000. You feel like you won something. It feels so amazing. Right and you buy a Tesla. You think you won that Tesla. Yes you just cut a huge check for it. But it feels like you won. And I don't know that health care delivers the experience often enough to where you feel like overwhelming gratitude. Like I am so thankful that I received this experience. I think we do when it is a life saving absolute situation. And we hear that over and over again. And that level of gratitude for that for sure. Yeah in the more I would say, routine transactions that we have in health care, probably not as often as most of our touch points are routine or on the more routine side. So that is a big opportunity as well. What I liked about the activity that we did was the people who are involved could connect. How delivering an intentional health care experience. Is similar to all of these services that they consume, so it took this what is patient experience? What does it mean? And they went, oh, I have experiences every day with other services that I consume and have that same opportunity. And so it starts that part process of beginning to really get the importance of the human experience. And health care. We talked about all these points of understanding, insight, right. That is like the stories straight from a mouth. We talk about different metrics around emotion. That's all great. What are we not learning from those that we serve? Like we're some of those gaps. You mentioned transitions. There's sort of a non-GAAP. What else? Like what would make your job easier as a CSO if you're able to illuminate different points along that patient journey? I think for me, it's that we're not learning it at the macro level. Right so we have individuals at the micro level who are really important members of our care team, who are building relationships with patients, who really get to know them, that get to know that, hey, if I'm ever hospitalized, I'm going to be worried the whole time about somebody feeding my cat at home because I don't have anyone feeding my cat. And that's going to weigh on me. And it's going to really impact my ability to engage in what I need to do to get better. And so there are oftentimes individuals that kind of hold that information. But we don't collectively, as a health system or a care team, really understand those things about people. I think other service industries kind of know more about us personally, that our shopping habits and, you know, a lot of different things. We all know we all get the Google things after we've been on a website. To me, I think that is the one thing that's missing as thinking about how do we design experiences that will have an impact on a broader group of people positively. It's like wanting to know all of that. It is such a powerful point to think about the tribal knowledge that a care team might have about an individual that doesn't get shared. And it's not anybody's fault. Nobody's keeping it a secret. There's just there's no place to put it. That seems like a clear opportunity for organizations or people to partner with organizations to be able to scale that up and out. Yes, we all have experiences where we've seen that go really well and we've seen that go not so well when we see a care team transition and you have to sort of reteach them everything about the person in the bed. And that's very frustrating. And then the other side of it is sometimes it all gets transitioned and it's like, wow, wow. It blows you away. Yes you know, I'm sure you've seen in your research that people just feel objectified when we're having health care experiences and we're in that role in our lives as a patient. It's easy to feel objectified. It's easy to feel a loss of control over. You don't have any personal autonomy and you're sort of at the whim of these people in these teams and you're already suffering because you're worried or you're not feeling well. And so I think the more we can understand who people are as people and the more we can comfort people with that knowledge and personalize experiences. So people don't feel objectified and they feel like they're seen and heard, then we can start to alleviate emotional suffering that occurs in health care. Right and probably not until then. Right you demonstrate that you're listening, that you see them as a person, not just a diagnosis or an illness. I love it. I love your approach to this. I mean, obviously, we're in lock step, right. In terms of how we're going to get after it together. It's very exciting stuff. We have to do this, pay it forward thing. You're meeting a peer cxo at a health system. It is their first day on the job based on everything that you do today. What's the one or two pieces of advice you'd give to that person on their first day? Yeah, so I think on their first day is you're running a marathon and you have to win it all and they don't have to win it on. And you won't win at all on day one. And you'll probably hit a certain mile where you think you're not going to make it at all, but just push through because you eventually will. And I think also really being open to listening to both sides of the experience. Again, we can't improve experiences for patients at the expense of the teams that take care of patients. So really needing to understand intimately both sides of that and find the best solution in between. That's what we all should be focused on, thinking about achieving that. Great insight. Jennifer baron, sexo of Uc Davis health, Ryan Donahue. Branwen, Thanks for listening to patient no longer. And you want to do the, like, alligator clap out? Sure done. Thank you. Thank you.