Improving the patient experience at every touchpoint
Kris Baird
Founder,
The Baird Group
Kris Baird has spent over three decades — first as a registered nurse, then as a healthcare marketing executive, and now as the founder of a 20-year-old consultancy — helping health systems close the gap between their brand promise and the reality patients encounter on the front lines. In this conversation, she and Lauren dig into the systemic and cultural forces that shape patient experience: from scheduling staff who don't know the tools at their fingertips, to physicians whose gatekeeping quietly undermines access, to the awkward tension of a portal that delivers lab results faster than a doctor can deliver context.
Kris argues that improving patient experience isn't about scripts, gift cards, or ad campaigns — it's about building a culture of empowerment from the top down, the bottom up, and side to side. She shares real-world examples from mystery shopping assignments, her own family's healthcare encounters, and decades of organizational consulting to make the case that the path to better care starts not with tactics, but with mindset. If you work in healthcare marketing, operations, or leadership, this one will hit close to home.
Key Takeaways:
Culture eats tactics for breakfast. Improving patient experience has to start with leadership and organizational culture — scripts, gift cards, and ad campaigns are just band-aids if the underlying mindset isn't there first.
Empowerment is the missing ingredient in service recovery. When something goes wrong, staff need clear authority to act — like the "20/20 rule" Kristin describes: if you can solve a problem for under $20 in under 20 minutes, you're empowered to do it. No approval needed.
Your brand promise is only as strong as your worst touchpoint. From the first phone call to the patient portal to the bill, every interaction either reinforces or undermines what your organization says it stands for. No one puts "patient-centered, except when we're busy" on a billboard — but that's often the reality.
Access barriers are often invisible from the inside. Scheduling bottlenecks, physicians holding appointment slots, staff unaware of their own software's features — these are the kinds of issues that only surface when someone asks the right questions from the outside.
Online scheduling and appointment requests are not the same thing — and patients are frustrated by the difference. As consumer expectations continue to rise, the friction created by outdated or misleading digital access points is a real threat to both patient loyalty and brand credibility.
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