Rick Evans, who has served as senior vice president and chief experience officer at NewYork-Presbyterian since 2015, will retire June 5. He will remain with the health system in an advisory capacity through the end of the year.
Mr. Evans was among the first executives to hold the chief experience officer title in American healthcare — a role that, when he stepped into it, had no established playbook.
Since then, the field of patient experience has matured considerably. What began as a largely undefined function has developed a rigorous evidence-based, standardized feedback mechanisms and measurable interventions. Mr. Evans credits the collaborative work of the first generation of chief experience officers for that evolution.
“It’s been a privilege to be part of the pioneer group of CXOs that worked together to create the body of knowledge that we now call patient experience,” Mr. Evans told Becker’s June 3. “Since those early days, we’ve learned how to more deeply understand the feedback that patients and families give us and we now have evidence based interventions that actually make things better for them.”
Mr. Evans’ connection to NewYork-Presbyterian stretches back more than two decades. He first joined the New York City-based system in 2004 as vice president of support services and patient-centered care. In this role, he led the organization’s “We Put Patients First” patient experience strategy and oversaw housekeeping, food service, patient escort and laundry operations.
In 2011, Mr. Evans left NewYork-Presbyterian to serve as the first chief experience officer of Massachusetts General Hospital and Massachusetts General Physicians Organization in Boston. At Mass General, he developed a comprehensive patient experience strategy that produced some of the highest patient satisfaction scores of any academic medical center in the country.
In late 2015, Mr. Evans returned to NewYork-Presbyterian as senior vice president and chief experience officer.
Over the past decade-plus, Mr. Evans has overseen patient experience strategy across 11 hospitals, more than 700 ambulatory sites and a workforce of more than 40,000 employees.
His portfolio extended well beyond patient experience surveys and scores, encompassing patient services, pastoral care, volunteers, medical interpreting, contact centers, patient placement and the NYP transfer center. He also served as national co-chair of the Patient Experience Policy Forum with the Beryl Institute and as a member of the American Nurses Credentialing Center’s Magnet Commission, bringing NYP’s experience and perspective to national policy conversations about how patient experience is measured and improved.
Mr. Evans became one of the field’s most authoritative and consistent voices on patient experience, contributing dozens of columns to Becker’s since 2019. As the field lurched through a pandemic, a workforce crisis and a prolonged recovery, his central argument held: Patients do not evaluate their care on clinical outcomes they cannot assess — they evaluate it on whether they felt heard, informed and in good hands. Building a system that consistently delivers that is among the hardest and most important work in healthcare.
“In the ever-changing, ever-challenged world of healthcare, there is still much work to do,” he said. “But we have made great strides in recent years and it’s been an honor to be part of that work.”
Retirement from NewYork-Presbyterian will not mean stepping away from the field entirely. Mr. Evans said he intends to stay active through teaching, writing and mentoring.
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