Chrissy Daniels collaborates with teams across Press Ganey to design, develop, and deliver strategies to boost patient experience that are informed by over 400 million patient voices. She works closely with healthcare organizations nationwide as a strategic and operational partner. Chrissy brings over 30 years of expertise in advancing the patient experience and building an engaging and collaborative culture. Frequently called upon as a guest speaker, she is widely recognized for her pioneering work in healthcare consumerism and physician performance data transparency.
Recently, in an exclusive interview with CXO Magazine, Chrissy shared her professional trajectory, insights on the role of technology in shaping the future of customer experience, significant career milestones, future plans, words of wisdom, and much more. The following excerpts are taken from the interview.
Hi Chrissy. How did you first get into customer experience, and what inspires you to stay?
My first job in patient experience was almost by accident. I moved from an administrative fellowship into an open position in patient complaints in the late 1990s. Our organization had a homegrown survey which told us that we were great! The volume of our patient complaints belied this performance. So my CEO gave me a global charge: “If I’m trying to do the right things, why are our patients so unhappy?” And my experience career started on that day. I love patient experience because it is tied to the intrinsic motivation of every healthcare caregiver and allows us to earn the trust and loyalty of our patients.
What do you love the most about your current role?
The best part of my current job is working with the thousands of Press Ganey clients to transform healthcare by making it safer and more caring for our patients. As an economist (which is my academic background), an added bonus is the hundreds of millions of patient voices which Press Ganey collects every year. It is a treasure trove that helps us understand how we can best serve each patient in our clients’ care.
What role do you see technology playing in enhancing the healthcare experience, and what innovations are you exploring or implementing to stay ahead of the curve?
There are so many ways, but here are four that I’m most excited about:
We are focused on used machine learning to predict, via a predictive rounding solution, the care that a patient might want before they even experience a gap; Using Artificial Intelligence to remove the burden of interpreting data, so that busy leaders know where and how to accelerate improvement; Expanding our qualitative research solutions so we can listen to patients in new ways, whether that is crowdsourcing, designing care processes, and even understanding the lived journeys of patients; Expanding our large language models to be able to ingest enormous verbatim comments and understand our quietest communities in specific ways, so we truly hear the voices of all patients.
How do you see the role of technology, specifically data analytics and AI, in shaping the future of customer experience? Are there any specific tools or platforms that you believe are essential for organizations to adopt?
Increasingly, it is essential to be able to connect patient experience data to other important operational data sets especially employee experience, safety, quality, and even brand and marketing insights. Right now, we don’t need more data, we need connected insights to allow us to take the right actions to advance sustainable change. There are a lot of new technology-supported tools to make our important work more sustainable given the realities of today’s staffing levels. So using technology-enabled answer assistants for reputation management, or automated discharge-calling solutions to spread our reach are all real-time ways we can make our teams more efficient.
How do you stay current with emerging trends and innovations in patient experience, and what resources do you rely on for inspiration and guidance?
Like all CXOs, I’m an experience junkie. I’m absorbing my lived experience and keeping an eye on innovations happening in all industries. Google Alerts are my friend, and I set aside at least 90 minutes a week to learn. Honestly though, so many of my inspirations come from the CXOs across healthcare, who are great practitioners of human-centered design – listening to what their patients want, using data to focus their action, and actively involving their teams to design meaningful and sustainable work.
What is your leadership philosophy and how do you keep team engaged and motivate them?
My leadership philosophy has been shaped by nearly 30 years improving experience in healthcare. I believe that the true motivation to improve experience comes from within. Everyone working in and for healthcare truly wants to make a difference in a patient’s life. My job is to connect individuals to the impact they have on patients’ lives, to provide clear goals and engage the expertise of patients and caregivers to make a true difference.
What has been your most career-defining moment that you are proud of?
Often those career-defining moments are only discovered in a rearview mirror. What has certainly been my most impactful work is bringing patient ratings and reviews collected on improvement surveys to the internet via health systems’ find-a-doctor pages. This is an idea which started as a reputation management strategy and has transformed the ability of millions of patients to find providers who meet their personal needs. In my opinion, it has planted the seeds of patient-provider trust even before that first visit occurs.
What are your passions outside of work?
Like so many CXOs, relationships are core to my life – investing in my family, friends and community. I love cooking – my pies are a pride point – and animals: dogs, a cat, bees and chickens!
Where do you see yourself in the next 5 years?
I will be here at Press Ganey. For me, this is the most important work I could ever do advancing the safe, high-quality compassionate care for every patient.
If you could give any advice to someone striving to be a CX Leader, what would it be?
No data without stories, no stories without data.