The Top 5 Takeaways from NGPX 2024
The Next Generation Patient Experience (NGPX) 2024 conference, held December 2-4, 2024, at the Westin Rancho Mirage in Palm Springs, brought together over 300 senior healthcare leaders. They gathered to share innovations, tackle challenges, and chart the future of patient experience.
From AI integration to social media strategies, the conversations revealed critical shifts happening across healthcare organizations nationwide.
Here are the five biggest takeaways that will shape patient experience in 2025 and beyond.
1. Social Media Has Become Healthcare's New Front Door
Healthcare organizations can no longer ignore the power of social media in shaping patient perceptions and driving business results. Julie Kennedy Oehlert, Chief Experience and Brand Officer at ECU Health, demonstrated this powerfully during her keynote on "Healthcare in the Age of Likes and Shares.”
"Content is fire, but social media is the gasoline. Let's give them something to talk about!” Kennedy Oehlert explained during her presentation. She shared how ECU Health's "Purple Blitz” strategy generated remarkable results:
"In fiscal year 2021, for online news and articles, we went from 438 million impressions to 3.3 billion. Television went from 3 million to 5.8 million.”
The impact extends beyond just numbers. ECU Health discovered that patients rely on digital sources 2.2 times more than doctor referrals when choosing a primary care provider. This shift demands a fundamental change in how healthcare systems approach marketing and patient engagement.
Kennedy Oehlert's team developed provider profiles that showcase real patient comments and professional photos. The results speak volumes about the power of authenticity in healthcare marketing.
2. AI Will Transform Patient Experience—But Only with Proper Implementation
Artificial intelligence emerged as both an opportunity and a challenge at NGPX 2024.
Vishal Bhalla, Forbes Thought Leader, former Senior Vice President, and Chief Experience Officer at Advocate Health, delivered sobering statistics during his CXO keynote on "Integrating AI into the Experience Journey to Break Silos and Demonstrate the Value of HX.”
"Did you know that 80% of all AI projects will fail, or are failing? Forget ROI. They're just outright failing,” Bhalla warned attendees. However, he emphasized the tremendous potential of artificial intelligence and its impact on healthcare: "If implemented correctly, imagine your AI project saving you up to 10% of your spend?”
Bhalla, a former cook, used a kitchen analogy to demonstrate how healthcare organizations can leverage their data using LLMs.
"Data comes in many forms, like different kinds of fruit in your fridge or cupboard. A recipe book helps you decide what you can make with what you've got; that's your language model, like ChatGPT. You blend your chosen ingredients together, just like machine learning. The finished smoothie in a fancy glass is your AI product.”
AI Has Strengths & Limitations
The key lies in understanding AI's limitations and strengths. Bhalla explained three critical concepts: bias, hallucination, and drift. These challenges require careful governance and human oversight.
Healthcare organizations must also ensure patient experience leaders have seats at the AI implementation table. As Bhalla noted, "You need to make sure your governance... that you are at the table. Fight for it. You need to be at the table.”
3. Workplace Violence Demands Immediate, Data-Driven Solutions
The conference addressed one of healthcare's most pressing challenges: workplace violence against healthcare workers. Julie Kennedy Oehlert and Vishal Bhalla presented a compelling case study on "Mitigating Workplace Violence using AI and Human Collaboration.”
The statistics they shared paint a stark picture. "Nurses experience workplace violence, 81.6 percent of those victims experience trauma from workplace violence. 73 percent are female,” Kennedy Oehlert reported during their presentation.
The financial impact is also significant. "The nation spends 428 million to deal with the consequences within their facilities, including quality of care and patient safety impacts, staff turnover, injuries and absenteeism, claims, mental health, including anxiety, depression, and post-traumatic stress disorder,” she explained.
Their solution combines predictive analytics with streamlined reporting systems. Healthcare organizations can now identify patterns and intervene before incidents occur, protecting both staff and patients.
A Need for Accessible Reporting Mechanisms
Another critical insight emerged around the importance of removing barriers to reporting and ensuring team members feel psychologically safe when voicing concerns. Traditional reporting mechanisms often fail due to complexity or fear of retaliation, leading to widespread underreporting and missed opportunities for intervention.
"What we found at ECU Health is not that people didn't want to report, but they didn't have ways that were easy and made them feel safe,” said Oehlert. "We have a variety of ways that people can report because that's what team members told us that they wanted.”
The session highlighted the deployment of voice-to-text reporting systems, multi-language support, and cross-platform data integration. These tools enable staff from all backgrounds, including non-clinical roles like EVS and food service, to report incidents easily and in real time.
These innovations improve data quality and empower staff to participate actively in building safer environments. They also help in fostering a culture where prevention, care, and timely response are integrated across all organizational levels.
4. Virtual Nursing is Revolutionizing Patient Care Delivery
Sharp HealthCare's presentation on "Virtual Nursing and the Positive Impact on Patient Experience” revealed a breakthrough in care delivery models. Tracy Plume, MSN-L, RN, Director, Centralized Patient Placement, Virtual Nursing at Sharp HealthCare, and Kara Yetter, MS-Health Informatics, BSN, RN, CPHIMS, and Supervisor of Virtual Nursing (CPPC) at Sharp HealthCare, demonstrated how virtual nursing addresses staffing challenges while improving patient satisfaction.
The results exceeded expectations. "The patient experience scores of the virtual patients are those top decile, top percentile scores in the 98th percentile,” Plume shared during their presentation.
Virtual nursing works by relieving bedside nurses of administrative tasks. Yetter explained their approach:
"We focus on admissions—doing thorough overviews of those admissions screenings. This is one of those tasks that's been put on the plate of the bedside nurse. There's a lot of good information that can help us better serve that patient if we take the time.”
The program expanded rapidly due to demand. Starting with three pilot nurses in April 2024, Sharp HealthCare now staffs 10 nurses covering over 400 beds. The success stems from focusing on both patient and staff satisfaction simultaneously.
5. Organizational Culture Drives a Sustainable Patient Experience
Multiple sessions emphasized that sustainable patient experience improvements require deep cultural transformation.
Marcela Reyes, MSN, RN, CPXP, CCMP, Executive Director of Consumer Experience at AdventHealth, and David Wall, MSW, LCSW, Director of Culture & Process for Consumer Experience at AdventHealth, shared their approach during the keynote session, "Delivering a Sustainable Acute Care Patient Experience Strategy in a Large, Complex Health System.”
Their "Whole Care Experience” onboarding program reaches every new hire across 100,000 team members. Wall explained the foundation:
"This is a four-hour learning experience where they get immersed with interactive activities, where they learn about our history, they learn about where we're going as a company, and they deeply learn about our mission, our vision, our values, and our service standards.”
The key lies in consistent reinforcement.
"All 100,000 team members that we have today would be able to tell you exactly what those service standards are and our mission. It's core to who we are. It's essentially our North Star,” Wall noted.
Brian Carlson, Vice President of Patient Experience at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, reinforced this theme during the "Follow the Yellow Brick Road” presentation:
"You must continue to re-teach the culture of the organization. You can't just put it on, have it in new employee orientation, stick it on the wall, and say, everyone's going to follow this.”
Conclusion: Technology and the Human Connection
NGPX 2024 revealed that the future of patient experience lies in embracing technology while maintaining human connection. Organizations that succeed will integrate AI thoughtfully, leverage social media authentically, protect their workforce proactively, innovate care delivery models, and build cultures that sustain excellence.
The conversations at NGPX weren't just about tactics and strategies. They focused on fundamental shifts in how healthcare organizations operate and connect with the communities they serve. As healthcare continues evolving rapidly, these insights provide a roadmap for leaders committed to putting patients first.
Don’t miss what’s next in patient experience innovation. NGPX 2025 is occurring from November 17 to 19 at the Westin Rancho Mirage in Palm Springs, California. Download the agenda and get tickets today.