When David Banks, president and CEO of AdventHealth, talks about empathy, he doesn’t frame it as a soft skill; he sees it as an economic force and measurable metric for his team.
AdventHealth is a $23 billion nonprofit system with 50 hospitals in nine states. The stakes are high for leaders and decision-makers workforce shortages, tightening margins and increased costs plague the healthcare system. But Mr. Banks doesn’t go straight to the dollars and cents for the leadership pipeline. Instead, he sees empathy as an operational strategy and a cornerstone of how the system competes, grows and gains trust within the community.
Compassion as a systemwide metric
The concept that empathy could have measurable ROI didn’t emerge from a consulting engagement or an internal task force. It started with a podcast.
“I love podcasts,” he said. “And so I’m listening to Freakonomics, which is one of my favorites. And Stephen Dubner is interviewing the author of the book Compassionomics. I listened to it twice. It was really compelling.”
Compassionomics, written by Stephen Trzeciak and Anthony Mazzarelli, focuses on research showing the human connection in healthcare matters in the patient experience and clinical outcomes. The 2019 book outlines evidence showing how much caregivers care about the outcomes for patients impacts their level of care. Clinicians with high compassion also reported less burnout and can bend the cost curve in healthcare, the authors reported.
Mr. Banks shared the podcast episode with his team and asked them to explore whether compassion could be measured, taught, and embedded into patient experience strategy. The idea resonated deeply.
“We brought in that thinking that’s in that book and trained 9,000 of our frontline leaders in the Compassionomics framework,” he said.
The premise was simple: if empathy demonstrably improves outcomes and satisfaction, then compassion is valuable.
AdventHealth’s commitment to compassion goes hand in hand with a broader redesign of the consumer experience. Mr. Banks said the health system began by fixing the obvious: responsiveness, transparency, and predictability. The system took action to:
- Roll out an app that now has 3 million users and a high satisfaction rating
- Revamped the phone system to answer calls more frequently
- Launched a price estimator.
Mr. Banks said one of the biggest complaints AdventHealth received was patients not knowing what their bill would be.
“It’s such a basic failure,” he said.
A Culture of Human Economics
Within months of rolling out the price estimator, 60% of patients were receiving accurate cost estimates within 24 hours of scheduling — within 5% of the final balance for bills over $1,000. But Mr. Banks was quick to point out that operational excellence alone isn’t enough.
“Hitting some basic components, the thought was those are structural things we should have been doing: answer the phones, make scheduling easier, give people bills they can understand,” he said. “But how do you want them to feel when they’re going through it? That is where the Compassionomics journey started for us.”
And it was a journey. The leadership team started by redesigning its approach to communication and paid attention to results. AdventHealth’s 2,000 care sites didn’t have a standard system for answering calls or responding to patient questions.
“We didn’t actually know how bad we were at it, so we brought a system in, and I’ll tell you, we didn’t do it great,” he said. “I have to say that because some of our team is in the room and they know how brutal it was putting that phone system in, and if we could do it again, we would do it better. But what we learned was we needed a system. We didn’t even know how many calls people were hanging up on us. They weren’t even waiting; we had no line of sight. As we figured out, we put in too heavy of technology first, but then we were able to dial it back.”
The efforts paid off. His team started tracking first-call resolution, which started around 50% and after the standard approach to improvement, AdventHealth is now around 87% of issues resolved in one call. Mr. Banks attributed the success to empowering people close to the patient.
“It’s not me sitting in my corner office. It’s that front desk scheduler who’s going to see those 100 patients in the clinic,” he said. “He or she knows, and sometimes I see big systems really disable that person with these dull, systemic solutions. We want them fully activated.”
The economics of empathy ultimately come down to leadership and culture. In addition to Compassionomics, Mr. Banks referenced Humanocracy by Gary Hamel and Michele Zanini as a guiding principle for his leadership. In the book, Mr. Hamel and Ms. Zanini argue for breaking down bureaucracy and redesigning management to build an organization where leaders have ownership of their markets and value a meritocracy, community and experimentation to thrive.
“How do you have large organizations act in more human ways — meaning that it can see an individual, it relies on the genius of the workforce to create the solutions the company needs?” he asked, referencing Gary Hamel’s Humanocracy.
The answer, he said, is empowering local teams and removing bureaucratic layers that stifle compassion.
“At $23 billion, we act like a national company where it’s advantageous,” he said. “But unlike other large national systems, we have kept our C-suites in our local facilities fully staffed. There’s a lot that only local [leaders] can do.”
