New Orleans-based Ochsner Health has built a unified strategy connecting employee and patient experience, and in 18 months has improved net promoter scores for physicians and more patients are calling their providers “kind.”
Nationally, Press Ganey found that hospitals in the top quartile for employee engagement are 4.2 times more likely to achieve top patient experience scores. This year, employee engagement rose from 3.97 to 4.01, the largest gain in eight years, and physician engagement climbed from 3.96 to 4.01.
Here are five ways Ochsner changed staff experience to improve patient experience.
1. Ochsner paired Alison Soileau, PhD, system vice president of patient experience and service excellence, with Nicole Pepitone, system vice president of employee experience and HR strategy, mirroring the physician-administrator dyad model the system has long used clinically.
2. Rather than running parallel workstreams, the teams merged their efforts into a single cohesive strategy.
“Instead of separate employee and patient experience plans, we now have one cohesive approach,” Dr. Soileau said in a news release published on the American Medical Association website.
3. Ochsner convened roughly 300 senior leaders to define the behaviors the organization wanted to build around. This included building a warm and friendly environment with the 10/5 rule: Smile and make eye contact within 10 feet, verbally acknowledge within five.
4. The teams then track overlapping signals — when patient experience scores improve, they examine what shifted in employee engagement data from the same area to identify scalable patterns.
5. Over the past 18 months, the net promoter score patients give Ochsner physicians climbed from 89 to 92. More than 100 physicians earned a perfect score of 100. Mentions of “kind” in patient surveys rose 40% between the first and and fourth quarters of 2025.
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