Patient experience scores across U.S. hospitals are rebounding slowly after pandemic-era declines.
According to a Press Ganey analysis of 10.5 million patient encounters released earlier in 2025, “recommend the hospital” scores rose from 69 in 2024 to 70.4 in early 2025, signaling a modest uptick in trust and satisfaction. Scores at medical practices and ambulatory surgery centers have each increased by several points since 2019, while inpatient scores have fallen by 2.2 points in the same period.
The analysis results suggest that while patient experience is improving overall, the biggest strides are occurring outside hospital walls. Outpatient environments are benefiting from targeted digital investments, streamlined access and better communication, while inpatient settings still struggle with coordination, predictability and information flow.
Scott Blanchard, director of digital patient experience at Chicago-based Rush University System for Health, said during Becker’s Health IT + Digital Health + RCM Conference that the health system’s own trajectory mirrors the national trend. In recent years, Rush has invested heavily in modernizing its ambulatory sites — from facility design to EHR-integrated scheduling tools — as outpatient volumes have climbed.
“We’ve built new facilities, updated the technology and tried to bring the clinic into the 21st century. That’s where a lot of care is going, and patients are seeing the results,” he said. Still, he added that inpatient care remains less consistent, particularly around discharge coordination and communication of next steps.
“Wouldn’t it be great if the technology automatically got a patient back in with that same specialist a week later?” he said. “Sometimes it still falls short there.”
For many organizations, the challenge is not whether they have digital tools, but how cohesively those tools are deployed. Rush has tried to avoid what Mr. Blanchard called “digital fragmentation” by centralizing decision-making for new technology initiatives and assigning “operational owners” to every project — a governance model designed to ensure staff accountability and consistent execution across sites.
At Portland-based MaineHealth, patient experience improvements have been driven by responsiveness and feedback. Marteen Santerre, the system’s director of patient engagement, said during the conference that her five-person team analyzes Press Ganey surveys alongside Google and Facebook reviews, as well as data from a 5,000-member online patient panel.
“We are able to ask them about their pain points and then respond to them with what we did to change their experience,” she said. “That has created a lot of trust, because we’re asking them, they’re telling us, we’re fixing things and we’re telling them what was fixed.”
Her team’s work has also led to tangible operational gains. By replacing manual appointment-confirmation calls with an automated platform built with Twilio, MaineHealth opened 20,000 appointment slots in one year and avoided an estimated $4 million in losses.
At Fort Wayne, Ind.-based Parkview Health, Laura Dubay, the system’s director of digital health, said during the conference that her focus has been on creating a consistent experience. Ambulatory settings offer convenience — online scheduling, prescription refills, virtual visits — while the inpatient side remains unpredictable. Parkview is using tools like Epic’s MyChart Bedside to share test results, coordinate discharge planning and engage families remotely, but consistency is a work in progress.
“We want the inpatient and outpatient experiences to look the same,” Ms. Dubay said. “There’s fear from the unknown and not having access to information.”
Clean, quiet environments remain another key factor in how patients rate their care. Press Ganey found that patients who rated “quiet at night” highly gave overall rest scores 46 points higher on average — a reminder that physical surroundings still matter as much as digital access or communication tools.
Community hospitals face an additional challenge: ensuring digital systems are inclusive of older adults. At Upland, Calif.-based San Antonio Regional Hospital, where about 30% of the community it serves is 65 or older, leaders initially questioned whether new technology would take hold.
“Even our CEO wasn’t convinced it would work,” Michelle Moore, the hospital’s director of patient access, said during the conference. But after testing digital pre-registration with a small group, the hospital found that about 70% of older adults completed the process online, and the results have remained consistent as the program expanded.
For Ms. Moore, the next frontier is interoperability: ensuring that patient records and imaging can move seamlessly between community hospitals and outside specialists. She recalled a recent experience where she had to carry a CD of her own medical scans to multiple appointments. “Hopefully soon we won’t have to be doing that,” she said.
Despite the influx of automation, the leaders agreed that technology’s success depends on keeping the human connection front and center.
“Healthcare is a people business,” Ms. Santerre said. “Keep the people, whether that’s your patients or your care teams, at the center of the work that you’re doing.”
The data supports that view. Hospitals where patients say their care teams “worked well together” see double-digit gains in trust-related metrics, and post-discharge communication can boost recommendation scores by more than 20 percentage points. Still, inpatient satisfaction continues to trail the gains seen in clinics and surgery centers, where design, convenience and transparency have reshaped expectations.
Closing that gap may require less innovation than integration — ensuring every digital advance feels personal rather than procedural.
“I maintain it’s the little things that end up being the differentiators. The baseline expectation has been raised so quickly with what patients expect from the digital experience,” Mr. Blanchard said. “Don’t underestimate those little things of trying to make the experience better and make sure that everything you do, you’re really thinking about the patient.”
