Sonia Rhodes

As the Advisory Board Company’s first-ever Chief Experience Officer, Sonia leads The Experience Lab – an incubator of ideas and an accelerator of action – created to bring Experience Design and Cultural Transformation principles to the health care industry. She most recently served as Chief Executive and Experience Officer of Sonia Rhodes Experience Design, a consultancy created to guide organizations and institutions through the intentional design of meaningful and memorable Experiences. Clients have included leading hospitals, health systems, non-profits and consumer focused enterprises.

Sonia was the first in the nation to serve as a health care executive responsible for Experience transformation. As Vice President of The Sharp Experience at Sharp HealthCare in San Diego, CA, she led the strategy, architecture and implementation of the organization-wide Experience transformation endeavor spanning Sharp’s 30 locations and 18,000+ team members. In her 18 years with Sharp, Sonia conceptualized, launched and led The Sharp Experience– a groundbreaking performance and Experience improvement initiative designed to transform every aspect of the health care Experience for team members, physician partners, patients and guests. 

Sonia is the co-author of The Complete* Guide to Transforming the Patient Experience (HCPro, 2009) and an acclaimed national speaker. She is an Emmy award-wining producer of the television documentary series, Stories of the Sharp Experience. In 2005, Sonia was one of the first to be nationally recognized for her individual achievement in the emerging Experience Economy, receiving the Experience Management Achievement (EMA) award. In addition to her Experience design work, Sonia is committed to helping build strong and healthy communities. She serves on various non-profit health care and education boards and is a member of TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design). As the founder, executive producer and curator for TEDxYouth@SanDiego, Sonia produces TEDx events, bringing together hundreds of diverse high school students to learn from and experience some of the world’s biggest thinkers and doers – all in the spirit of ideas worth spreading.

Sonia and her husband Scott are the proud parents of two daughters. Kelsey is a recent graduate from Gerald Ford School of Public Policy at the University of Michigan, and Madison is a senior at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service.