Vice President | Patient Experience

Gundersen Health System•La Crosse, IA

7d•Hybrid

About The Position

Emplify Health is seeking a Vice President, Patient Experience to serve as the enterprise leader responsible for shaping the strategy, governance, operating model, and culture that drive exceptional human experiences across the organization. Reporting to the Chief People Officer, this leader will integrate patient, family, workforce, and community experience into a unified enterprise strategy that advances quality, safety, workforce engagement, operational excellence, and organizational reputation. This role provides leadership across all regions and care settings and partners closely with executive leaders, physicians, nursing, operations, IT Digital Services, HR, quality, and finance. The Vice President will serve as a senior advisor to executive leadership and the Board on patient experience, helping ensure Emplify Health continues to strengthen the way patients, families, caregivers, and communities experience care. This is a high-impact enterprise leadership opportunity with visibility across Emplify Health’s regions and care settings. The Vice President, Patient Experience will help shape and align best practices across the organization, strengthen governance and accountability, and partner closely with executive leaders, the Board, and the culture and engagement team. The role offers the chance to build on strong patient experience performance, improve consistency in how feedback is translated into action, and advance a more integrated approach to patient, physician, and digital experience.

Requirements

Master’s degree in Healthcare Administration, Business Administration, Public Health, Human Services, or a health-related field; or equivalent combination of education and experience; or master’s degree acquired within 5 years of hire.
Certified Patient Experience Professional (CPXP) within 3 years of hire.
10+ years of progressive healthcare leadership, including executive-level responsibility.
Demonstrated success leading enterprise transformation in a matrixed health system.

Nice To Haves

Health system integration experience.
Lean, Six Sigma, or Design Thinking certification.
Experience with AI-enabled experience solutions.

Responsibilities

Establish and execute the enterprise patient experience strategy.
Establish enterprise governance for patient advocacy, grievances, and service recovery.
Lead the enterprise listening strategy integrating patient, family, caregiver, and community feedback.
Govern enterprise dashboards connecting experience, workforce, quality, safety, operations, and financial performance.
Champion digital and AI-enabled innovations that reduce friction for patients and caregivers.
Ensure experience strategies address health equity and disparities.
Partner with HR to sponsor organization-wide culture transformation centered on empathy, belonging, psychological safety, and service excellence.
Partner with HR to embed experience into leadership development, onboarding, recognition, and performance management.
Represent Emplify Health externally through professional organizations and strategic partnerships.
Organizational Strategy and Implementation -- Recognizes market trends, judges the impact on their AOR, contributes to responsive strategic plans, develops AOR operational plans, articulates these plans, and ensures they are communicated to gain alignment and commitment of all AOR staff.
Fiscal Management -- Effectively uses established processes to ensure accountability for effective operations and resource management.
Human Resource Management -- Effectively uses established processes to: select, align, develop, motivate, manage, and retain a team of highly skilled employees.
Excellence in Service and Quality-- Achieves seamless delivery of quality patient care, safety, excellence in patient experience, and customer service. Utilizes Continuous Quality Improvement principles and platform planning in decisions, improvements, and system design.
Organizational Leadership -- Provides leadership and accomplishes objectives by ensuring the integration of processes and initiatives while modeling collaboration. Participates and supports in brand/service delivery teams as requested.
Maintains accountability for implementation of requirements of regulatory agencies
Serves as liaison to the community
Duties and responsibilities as defined by specific department (if applicable)