Vice President, Patient Experience

Memorial Health•Springfield, IL

About The Position

The Vice President, Patient Experience is Memorial Health’s senior executive responsible for shaping, advancing, and sustaining a unified, high reliability culture of exceptional patient and family centered experiences across the enterprise. This role ensures that every patient, family member, and community partner experiences the organization as compassionate, coordinated, respectful, and trustworthy regardless of care setting, provider, or point of entry. The VP of Patient Experience leads the strategic design and operational integration of patient experience across clinical care, access, service delivery, digital engagement, and organizational culture. Working in close partnership with clinical, operational, and administrative leaders, this executive aligns experience excellence with quality, safety, equity, and financial stewardship, ensuring that patient experience is not a standalone function but a core business and clinical imperative. As the enterprise champion for the voice of the patient and family, the VP, Patient Experience ensures that patient insights, outcomes, and lived experiences directly inform system strategy, care redesign, workforce development, and technology investments. This role bridges the gap between frontline care delivery and executive leadership, translating patient feedback and experience data into actionable, system-wide improvements that elevate trust, loyalty, and outcomes. The VP, Patient Experience also serves as a visible and credible leader for physicians, nurses, and staff, modeling behaviors that reflect empathy, transparency, and accountability. Through this leadership, the VP, Patient Experience builds a culture in which exceptional experience is inseparable from exceptional care and where every interaction advances healing, dignity, and belonging. Embodies the Memorial Health System values of Safety, Integrity, Quality and Stewardship that support our mission, vision and goals.

Requirements

Master’s degree in health or business-related field of study required.
Minimum of ten (10) years of experience in a hospital or related healthcare setting.
Minimum ten (10) years of overall patient experience.
Experience collaborating with executives, board members, community partners, healthcare associations, and volunteers on patient experience-related activities.
Strategic Mindset: Strong visionary skills with an ability to translate complex strategies into aggressive goals, targets and action plans that deliver results. Maintains ongoing feedback, measurement and assessment processes that determine progress to plan.
Business Insight: Deep understanding of the market dynamics, competitive landscape, and healthcare trends. Demonstrates intellectual curiosity by seeking out new information and market awareness and uses that knowledge to advance Memorial Health’s experience strategies.
Financial Acumen: Familiarity with financial analysis, budgeting, and forecasting to evaluate strategic initiatives, understanding the financial indicators/levers to deliver earnings at or above budget, regardless of changes in the environment.
Communication Skills: Excellent written and verbal communication skills to effectively inspire support of Memorial Health’s mission and experience initiatives.
Stakeholder & Community Engagement: Builds and nurtures strong relationships with board, enterprise leadership, Memorial Health colleagues, and key community partners.

Nice To Haves

Certified Patient Experience Professional (CPXP) preferred.
Fellow of American College of Healthcare Executives (FACHE) preferred.
Lean Six Sigma (yellow or green belt) preferred.

Responsibilities

Strategic Leadership Develop and execute an enterprise wide patient experience strategy aligned with organizational goals, quality outcomes and financial sustainability.
Serve as executive sponsor for all patient experience, service excellence, and patient engagement initiatives.
Integrate experience priorities into clinical operations, quality, safety, access, workforce, and digital transformation strategies.
Service Excellence Partner with executive, physician, nursing, and frontline leaders to ensure patient experience expectations are consistently modeled, measured, and reinforced.
Sponsor enterprise wide service excellence frameworks, standards of behavior, and leadership development.
Patient & Family Engagement Establish structures for meaningful patient, family, and community voice in organizational design, policy, and improvement efforts.
Oversee patient and family advisory councils and co design initiatives.
Ensure equity, cultural responsiveness, and health literacy are embedded in all experience strategies.
Ensure reliable systems are established to address patient and family complaints and grievances.
Measurement & Improvement Oversee all patient experience measurement systems (e.g., HCAHPS, real-time feedback, complaints and grievances).
Translate experience data into actionable insights and improvement priorities at the system, hospital, and unit level.
Lead improvement initiatives to enhance communication, access, responsiveness, and coordination of care.
Clinical & Operational Integration Partner with quality, safety, nursing, medical staff, operations, and access leaders to ensure patient experience is integrated into care delivery redesign.
Lead initiatives that reduce barriers to care, improve transitions, and support continuity and patient navigation.
Digital & Consumer Experience Collaborate with IT, marketing, and access leaders to create seamless digital and omnichannel patient experiences.
Ensure patient portals, scheduling, billing, and communications are intuitive, compassionate, and supportive.