Uncommon Compassion: Session Recap: Key Takeaways from Julie Rish at NGPX 2025

2025, NGPX. KEYNOTE: Translating Uncommon Compassion into Uncommon Care: Building an Evidence-based Culture and Behaviors that Transform Patient Experience

Announcer: Thank you. Thank you. Okay. Next up, I'd like to welcome Julie Rich, chief Experience Officer at Advent Health. Welcome, Julie. Okay.

Julie Rish, VP, Consumer Experience, AdventHealth: Goodness, thank you so much for this opportunity. It's a privilege to be here. And talking a little bit about some of the work that we've done, and I love that I just followed Ashley and Lou who talked about like that empathy and compassion being the most important thing to team members. So I'm gonna talk a little bit about our journey with that, how we wanted to deepen that skillset across the company.

I work for Advent Health. I'm the chief of. Officer there. If you don't know much about Advent Health, we're a rather large health system based in Orlando, Florida, but across nine states, about 53 hospitals and over a hundred thousand team members. And, and, we're a company that came together as a series of brands.

And so part of this journey began when we started to align under one brand and build a cultural foundation and to think about how do we consistently invest in that cultural foundation. So today I wanna talk about that. I wanna talk a little bit about what we call the uncommon compassion journey.

Deepen the skillset but also talk a little bit about how they, we weave that through the evidence-based behaviors and how do we work as a system at the scale that we have. So let's build, begin with our cultural foundation. We are a faith-based healthcare company, which means, our mission is to extend the healing ministry of Christ.

One of the things that we did is we came together under one brand, is we aligned both. We were a company, a series of companies that had the same mission, but all over the map, vision, values, and service standards, so that the opportunity was to come together as something. And you can see our vision and values, but most importantly, I think for the team member is how do they bring forward their work through our service standards?

And those service standards up here are keep me safe, love me, make it easy, and own it. One of the things I love about this company is our vision. So the vision of the company is to provide holistic care and to be known for preeminent faith-based, consumer-focused clinical care. So not being settled with.

Good and not being settled with great, but wanting to be consistently exceptional when it came to the care experience. And so that's something to get excited about. It's also something that's quite daunting, as you all know. We also did a ton of research, both internal, our own consumers, but also external.

And we realize that in order for a consumer to wanna choose us. We were gonna have to design our systems, our experiences to be easy to access, simple to use, and ultimately to help someone feel whole. Of course, patient experience spans all of this, but oftentimes we think about our highest calling is, are we creating feel whole moments?

Are we caring for the entire person, mind, body, and spirit? And so that was a core to our work, but also core to our mission. So we have a cultural foundation, we've aligned a company, but the next part is how do we deepen the learning across the company. So one of the things that we do is we bring every team member through our onboarding programs.

This is our foundation, our cultural introduction for all new team members about who we are, what we value, what we expect of them to in living out our service standards. This is something that is delivered both in person locally owned by a campus. Systemly aligned, and for team members that might span many settings or be more remote in nature.

We have this live from our studio in a very stream streamed online experience. Regardless of the format, both are highly participatory. That means we want to hear your voice. We want you based on the principles of adult learning theory to interact with the content.

Building on that, we know that one moment in time, in the first weeks of your onboarding in a new campus isn't enough to sustain our cultural foundation. So the second part of how we bring that forward for our team members is through an annual celebratory town hall. So this is a moment across all those settings the.

50 plus hospitals, the thousands of medical practices that we're coming together with one message across the company and one message that builds in our cultural foundation. One message that takes those service standards breaks it down, and we have a conversation about it with our entire teams locally.

It's also an opportunity where we're recognizing our team members, so who has exemplified our service standards that we wanna raise up and celebrate them in this moment. We do this in really fun ways. Every year there's a theme. This year it's propelled with purpose last year's lighting the way, but it is a way to create fun and energy around that.

This is our mission for the year.

We also realize, and much like we've heard today that kindness connection are often challenges, right? It's very foundational that it's also a gap for many of our team members. So we wanted to think about how do we deepen learning? We have our foundation, we have our town halls, but that's probably not enough to bring this forward to every person, every time.

And so building off of our Love Me service standards and really similar to ECU Health, one of those behaviors that we're asking our team members to do is I treat others with uncommon compassion. We wanted to think about how could we bring a message forward around empathy and compassion to the a hundred plus thousand team members in a way that they could actually deliver across the company and scale.

And we did this through what we lovingly refer to as the Uncommon Compassion Journey. And it was really three different components. So the first component is. Investing in our leaders. Do our leaders know what it means to lead with empathy? Do they know how to bring that message forward to their teams and how they could be a leader of investment in empathy?

Meaning how do they bring the message forward in very real and tangible ways and coach their teams more directly, but also making certain that they understand the compelling literature that exists. Behind what it means to lead with empathy, what it means to communicate with empathy. After we trained our leaders, we engaged the entire a hundred plus thousand team members through a seven part micro learning series.

This is intended to be brief focused learning over time that someone could. Technically fit within the existing infrastructure. So let me break that down for you. So the, there's a micro-learning video for each of those seven parts that is sent out locally by the CEO of that campus, inviting you as a team member to listen to this video is less than five minutes following that video.

What we asked those leaders that we brought into that leadership expectation program is. We need you to bring this to life through a discussion with your team. And so that was their job, is to have a five to 10 minute conversation, ideally within an existing meeting. So you already have team meetings, you already have huddles.

Make this just an agenda item so it can flow naturally within that conversation that you're already having. This was our journey in the seven different modules. And we went to the literature, of course, first to say, what are the most important skills that we can teach our teams to better and more deeply connect with patients?

And that started with an introduction to the series, an invitation from our highest. Leader of the company saying, Hey, we're inviting you to come on this journey. I'm gonna go on it too. We're gonna learn together, we're gonna talk about this together and reflect together as a company. And then digging into each of those behaviors, right?

How do we explore perspectives, non-judgmental presence? Seeking to understand another's feelings and then how do we build on our service excellence framework we already have, which for us is eyecare. So communicate understanding, but also resolve and address service recovery as that comes up. And then it closed again with our highest level leader, thanking them for their participation in that and then compelling, inviting them to carry that forward to.

To their patients and to the consumers and to each other as we go forward. I would love to show you one of those videos. It was very much intended for our teams, but I'd love to show you one and show you a little bit about the connection card that we used to facilitate the conversation. So indulge me for a minute and let's watch a video.Promotional Video: Thank you for your patience. It will be one moment please.

Promotional Video: Oh, of course he's on the phone. Please hurry up.

Sure, anytime. Have a good one. Thank you. She seems worried. I wonder what she's going through. So sorry for the delay. You seem worried, if you have questions, how may I help you?

Thank you.Promotional Video: I can't find a doctor's appointment. I've been calling around town and no one has any openings for several weeks. Do you have any idea what that's like to feel sick and like you can't get the help that you need?

How would I feel if I couldn't find help? I can only imagine how frustrating this has been for you, especially when you're sick.

I'm sorry for any inconvenience, and I want you to know that my goal is to get you the help that you need by the end of this call. So thank you for letting me help you, and

let's look into some possible options together. Thank you so much.Promotional Video: We received his biopsy results and it's confirmed as adenocarcinoma, which is a type of cancer Lisa score you hear again.

Be strong for him. Everything's happening so fast, I have no idea what's going on.

I wanna discuss treatment options.

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I can't imagine how overwhelming all this information must be for you and your son

Announcer: and information that's coming at you both very fast.

I wanna walk through results, next steps and possible treatment plans, and I want to make sure that we take the time to answer any questions that you both may have. We are here for you.

Julie Rish, VP, Consumer Experience, AdventHealth: Thank you for that. The team poured their hearts into that work and trying to bring the message in a real way to our team members, something that would relate what followed. That was a discussion, right? A locally led discussion with your immediate team that allowed you to reflect on that video.

Introduced it, gave you some additional scenarios and asked some probing questions about how would you feel in that situation? What would we do differently if we knew that person's perspective? And then for us, it finished strong. Like how does that. Behavior tie and connect back to extending Christ's healing ministry.

But I thought like the tactical, tangible approach to the conversation was incredibly meaningful. And particularly being a leader and having that with your team allowed us to carry it forward and then think about, okay, so what could we do differently based on the learnings from this week? One of the things we also did is we asked our leaders about their feedback at the end of this, and we were like so encouraged by how well they responded, right?

They found it to be so helpful that they were seeking out ways to lead with empathy, that they felt they were more confident in their ability to have those types of conversation. Encouraging, but also the evolution of that and the investment of that at scale. It was nice to see this at the other end of that because we asked for a heavy investment from the company.

So the piece that we think a lot about is so we have a cultural foundation. We're investing in that. We're trying to continue to sustain it, but we also need to think about, so how does that layer into the evidence-based practices and how do we make certain that we are doing that across the company and at scale?

One of the ways that we've done that is we've created blueprints. So this is the inpatient version of that. I realize that it's quite small, but but this is what are the best practices? What are the things we know work? If you do it, it's gonna lead to a better outcome. But also we wanted to emphasize really tactically, it is a whole house approach.

It is not me as the patient experience leader that can do all of these things to drive our improved. Improvement. It is gonna take all of our leaders and all of our team members in order to deliver on this for our patients. We also heard from our team like that's really great. Thanks so much for giving me that.

And you told me what I need to do, but I need you to tell me more about the how what is this actually gonna take? What do you really mean when you say that? In building on that and in listening to them and reflecting on what they needed, we built playbooks across every setting that defined what are those formal definitions?

What are the best practices? Why are they the best practices? What exactly is your role and responsibility? What am I asking you to do? How. Am I asking you to do that? What does that look like? We also wanted to educate them. A lot of people were telling, saying, what? What are the process measures? What do you mean when you say that?

Let me tell you what the process measures is. I want to tell you what that is. And then we talked a lot about what are those minimum accountabilities, right? We would build a strong foundation of experience in our company and we wanna be clear about what we're asking you to do at the core. One of the things I'm really proud of when we started this work, when we started the uncommon compassionate Journey, when we started thinking about how do we solidify those best practices, how do we make certain that they're available, accessible, and easy to understand for everyone?

We looked at those questions on our surveys that connected back to empathy and compassion, right? Did we care for you? Did we offer concern? Were we just basic courteous and respectful? Did we work as a team? Did we respond to your questions and concerns? But we looked at those, not necessarily, but also because many times they are key drivers, but we felt that those were their empathy drivers, right?

Those are the human connection that we're striving so hard for. And what I'm really encouraged by is that we saw. Nearly all of these, a double digit improvement in percentile ranking during the course of this time, which is, these are hard things to move. Human behavior is hard to move. We're encouraged by what we've seen.

That does not mean the work is done. We got a ton of work still to do. But we are encouraged by what it what outcome we can receive when we invest in our team members. So I am going to stop here and say thank you so much for this opportunity to share. I'm humbled to do it. You are such an amazing group of leaders who are driving this industry forward, and we're just so happy to be a part of the conversation.

So thank you so much for the time.

Announcer: Thank you. Thank you. Okay. I think the panel's gonna get up there before I do