What The Chief Experience Officer Brings to Hospital Systems
While some are clinicians, many come from marketing/communications backgrounds.
// By Ron Shinkman //
As hospital systems have merged and grown over the years, so have the number of executives occupying their C-suites. The chief information officer (CIO) was a creation of the 1990s, as hospitals began relying on electronic medical records. A more recent admittee to the C-suite is the CXO, or chief experience officer.
Like the rise of the CIO, the CXO is a response to changing times in the health care sector.
Eugene Scioscia, MD, chief experience officer for the Allegheny Health Network
“We had a world of medicine for many, many generations, which was paternalistic. The doctor owned the patient and drove policy,” says Eugene Scioscia, MD, CXO for the Allegheny Health Network, an 11-hospital system in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. But Scioscia says that has changed in the past five to 10 years. These days, the patient is the one who “owns” their own care.
“It’s a consumer-driven society more than ever, and they have access to more information than ever. They’re empowered to seek information around their care and understand much more about their information,” Scioscia observes.
As a result, Scioscia says hospitals and health care systems now compete on service, a phenomenon abetted by HCAHPS and other quality, outcomes, and experience scorecards widely available to the public.