Top Speakers from NGPX 2024 Are Returning for NGPX 2025: Here’s What to Expect
Next Generation Patient Experience (NGPX) 2025 brings together America's most innovative patient experience leaders for three days of strategic collaboration and breakthrough thinking. As healthcare systems face mounting economic pressures, staff burnout, and evolving patient expectations, NGPX 2025 emerges as both a catalyst for change and a vital community for professionals dedicated to reimagining human-centered care.
This year's conference, taking place November 17-19, 2025, at the Westin Rancho Mirage in Palm Springs, features a distinguished roster of returning speakers from NGPX 2024 who will share advanced strategies, proven methodologies, and transformative insights that have reshaped patient experience across major health systems.
Below, you’ll find some of the top takeaways from these speakers in 2024, as well as what you can expect from them at this year’s event.
Julie Kennedy Oehlert
Julie Kennedy Oehlert made significant contributions across three NGPX 2024 sessions, showcasing ECU Health's innovative approaches to patient experience and workplace safety.
Julie Kennedy Oehlert’s Contributions to NGPX 2024
- Keynote: Healthcare in the Age of Likes and Shares: The Power of Social Media
- Fireside Chat: Using Data to Better Understand What Your Patients Actually Think (with Mark Lomax, CEO, PEP Health and Aloha McBride, Global Healthcare Strategist)
- Case Study: Mitigating Workplace Violence using AI and Human Collaboration (with Vishal Bhalla, Forbes Thought Leader, Former SVP, Chief Experience Officer, Market CHRO, Advocate Health)
In her social media keynote, she presented the "Purple Blitz" strategy. This was the "earned media” strategy that elevated ECU Health to #1 for positive social media presence among similar-sized hospitals. She demonstrated how comprehensive provider profiles using patient survey comments build trust and combat poor online ratings, while implementing creative employee engagement through selfie stations and hashtag campaigns.
During the fireside chat on patient data, Oehlert emphasized trust as fundamental to healthcare outcomes. She also advocated for multiple listening methods to understand not just patients but entire communities and caregivers. She connected trust directly to patient adherence to treatment plans, as well as prevention and wellness.
In the workplace violence case study, Oehlert addressed the "wicked problem" of healthcare violence, sharing real incidents while presenting a comprehensive prevention framework. She highlighted data-driven security scheduling and reporting mechanisms that accommodate healthcare workers' needs.
What to Expect from Julie Kennedy Oehlert at NGPX 2024
Attendees can expect innovative networking and collaborative problem-solving experiences when engaging with Julie Kennedy Oehlert, Chief Experience and Brand Officer at ECU Health, during NGPX 2025.
- Fresh Faces, Shared Spaces: Coffee House Social Hour for NGPX Newbies
- Design Thinking Roundtable Workshops: Collaborative Problem-Solving with PX Leaders
In the Fresh Faces, Shared Spaces: Coffee House Social Hour, first-time attendees will benefit from Julie's welcoming mentorship as an Advisory Board member. Her approach emphasizes creating low-pressure environments that foster genuine connections, mirroring her successful social media strategies at ECU Health.
Newcomers can expect her to share practical insights about navigating the healthcare experience landscape while helping them build meaningful professional relationships in a relaxed, coffeehouse atmosphere.
During the Design Thinking Roundtable Workshops, Julie will facilitate hands-on collaborative sessions focused on real-world patient experience challenges. Drawing from her expertise in workplace violence prevention, social media strategy, and trust-building initiatives, she'll guide small groups through rapid-cycle innovation processes.
Participants can expect her to bring her problem-solving approach to challenges like care transitions and staff burnout.
Alison Soileau, PhD
Alison Soileau, PhD, FACHE, Certified Pt Exp Leader (CPXP-L), System Vice President, Patient Experience & Service Excellence at Ochsner Health, focuses her work on patient- and family-centered care.
Dr. Soileau’s Contributions to NGPX 2024
A champion for empathy, Dr. Soileau collaborates with medical staff on behalf of patients to ensure their experiences are excellent.
- Keynote: Wellbeing, Physician Leadership & Patient Experience
Dr. Soileau’s keynote address took place on December 4th, which focused on issues like burnout, employee wellbeing, and staff safety. She shared strategies for building trust between healthcare administrators, physicians, and patients. Her speech addressed how physician wellbeing directly impacts patient experience outcomes.
What to Expect from Dr. Soileau at NGPX 2025
Attendees who attend Dr. Soileau’s case study at NGPX 2025 can expect to hear innovative ideas about patient experience rankings and efforts to drive health outcomes.
- Case Study: Beyond the Ranks & Scores – The Impact of Processes
As Ochsner Health's System Vice President of Patient Experience & Service Excellence, Dr. Soileau will share her team's transformative experience during a period when they operated without traditional patient experience survey scores for several months.
This unexpected circumstance became a catalyst for innovation, leading to remarkable clarity and creativity in their approach. Dr. Soileau will demonstrate how stepping away from rankings allowed her team to focus on process metrics that revealed previously hidden correlations between procedures and patient outcomes.
Key takeaways from her session will include the discovery of sustainable improvement strategies that go beyond score-chasing, understanding how process visibility enhances leadership accountability, and learning to identify root causes of experience breakdowns through data-driven insights. Her presentation will showcase how process metrics directly influence patient perceptions and provide practical frameworks for measurement that prioritize meaningful change over numerical rankings.
Amy Searls
Amy Searls, Chief Experience Officer at Prime Healthcare, has led systemwide efforts to elevate patient and employee experiences across 44 hospitals and more than 300 outpatient locations.
Amy Searls’ Contributions to NGPX 2024
At NGPX 2024, Amy Searls participated in a panel that explored effective ways of promoting healthcare literacy among patients and communicating with them to improve health outcomes.
- Panel: Empowering Patients Through Health Literacy: Strategies for Effective Communication and Engagement
This panel was held at a time when health systems are attempting to modernize and digitize the patient experience. However, they face a generational and technical divide among patients when it comes to their use of technology.
A 2024 study by NGPX Insights, sponsored by Gozio Health, found that 46% of healthcare providers have difficulty engaging patients using digital tools as part of their digital integration strategies.
In the same study, 31% of healthcare leaders said it is not easy and convenient for patients to communicate securely with healthcare providers using digital tools. Similarly, 23% said it is not easy or convenient for patients to access educational resources.
What to Expect from Amy Searls at NGPX 2025
Amy Searls will perform a keynote address on a day in which the theme is "operationalizing patient experience.”
- Keynote: The Patient Experience Revolution – Proving ROI to Drive System-Wide Change
Searls' keynote focuses on transforming HCAHPS metrics into compelling business cases that resonate across organizational levels—from boardrooms to bedside care. Her approach emphasizes translating patient experience data into clear, outcomes-driven narratives tied to retention, reimbursement, and reputation.
Under her leadership at Prime Healthcare, the organization has implemented a caring communication model inspired by Jean Watson's theory, resulting in significant improvements in HCAHPS and ED CAHPS scores.
The keynote will provide practical strategies for aligning patient experience with financial performance. Searls will demonstrate how to communicate PX ROI across diverse audiences, from executives to frontline staff, using data to secure buy-in and unlock resources.
Her methodology focuses on embedding experience excellence into an organization's strategic framework, addressing the common challenge patient experience professionals face in gaining organizational investment.
Searls has been recognized multiple times by Becker's Healthcare as one of the "Chief Experience Officers to Know" nationally, including in 2024 and 2025.
Don’t Miss Hearing the Brightest Minds in Patient Experience
The return of these distinguished speakers to NGPX 2025 underscores the event’s reputation as the premier destination for patient experience innovation and strategic advancement. Don’t miss the opportunity to learn from and collaborate with some of the most accomplished professionals in healthcare.