2025
Experience Perspective

Trust in healthcare is evolving—driven principally and importantly by demographic shifts and changing expectations among consumers, patients, and employees. Social, cultural, and demographic factors have always shaped things like expectations, brand perception, and trust. And while in this perspective we focus on age-related research, we acknowledge that there is much more to think about and prepare for. But the reality today is that we are on the precipice of large-scale changes as the healthcare needs of younger populations increase. Keeping both individuals and systems in mind, we emphasize research and strategies to build and sustain trust by:

• Understanding what healthcare consumers expect from their experiences
• Aligning behavior with brand promise
• Reimagining the role of the patient experience team
• Empowering frontline leaders to build trust by creating a culture of reliability, competence, and respect for all those they encounter—patients and employees alike

Foreword

Combining the expertise and experience of healthcare executives and employees with feedback from millions of patients and consumers, NRC Health has forged a distinct perspective for 2025.

In the 2024 Experience Perspective, we highlighted the importance of intentionally bridging the traditional silos between brand, consumer, patient, and employee/workforce experience. We delivered a clear message: Elevating experience requires thinking differently and taking decisive action. We explored this further in 2024 in our white paper, Next-generation Human Understanding: A Playbook for Healthcare Experience Management. After we asked, listened, and studied throughout the year, the focus for this Experience Perspective became clear: The need for trust is a call to lean harder into and evolve an experience mindset. We are doing a deep dive into the evolution of trust at a critical time in which consumers, patients, and employees are demonstrating differing experiential preferences, ranging from traditional to adaptive to digital-first. Guided by our research, we propose a trust framework to help leaders understand and address what matters to unique humans receiving, delivering, and supporting care strategies that are humanized for the unique needs of patients and care teams alike.

The first section unpacks new research that underscores the importance of driving trust. The second explores experience management as a primary capability for holistically meeting the expectations of trust. The remaining sections delve into the relevance of trust as applied to healthcare brands, consumers, patients, and employees.

Each section shares rich perspectives to provoke thoughts and help you turn insights into action. And you can trust us to be with you every step of the way.

“Take no one’s word for anything, including mine-but trust your experience.” —James Baldwin