Building Healthcare CX That Doesn't Fail Patients
Healthcare invests heavily in patient experience. Patients often don't feel it. This session unpacks why support systems underperform — and what operations teams can change right now.
Healthcare invests heavily in patient experience. Patients often don't feel it.
The stakes of a poor support experience in healthcare are unlike any other industry. Patients contact support not because they want to, but because they need to. At that moment, they are often vulnerable, stressed, and dependent on the interaction going well. When it doesn’t, the cost isn’t a lost sale. It’s broken trust, clinical risk, and sometimes something far worse.
This session focuses on what it takes to build healthcare CX that holds up when patients need it most, touching on process complexity, emotional weight, compliance pressure, and human connection at the same time.
Session summary
Even with proactive automated calls and texts confirming patient transport, roughly half of interactions still need a human agent to step in, said Daniel Wardell, who leads EMEA CX for a contact-centre technology firm and has spent 20 years working across regulated industries including healthcare. Simply Contact’s Alexandra Budinek explained why: patients must re-confirm their medical eligibility every 30 days, and answering a question differently, even by mishearing it, can see their transport revoked without warning. Describing a four-year digital transformation project at a Swiss hospital, moderator Gregorio Uglioni said the recurring question of who owns the patient experience was resolved by placing accountability for a patient’s entire stay with the chief nursing officer, the only role following a patient from admission to discharge across every department. Healthcare support most often fails patients through poor system design, particularly when compliance is treated as a legal afterthought instead of a feature built into the interaction from the start.
Key points discussed
- Why healthcare CX fails at the design level — not the execution level
- The emotional complexity of patient interactions and how to train for it
- Handling eligibility checks and sensitive processes with dignity and empathy
- Where AI genuinely reduces friction in healthcare support — and where it creates risk
- Compliance as a core experience design principle, not a constraint bolted on later
- Accountability structures: what good governance of patient support looks like across teams, vendors, and technology
Speakers
CX Transformation Leader
Forward
Associate Partner at Zurich consultancy Forward and former Head of Business Transformation at the Cantonal Hospital of Winterthur. A CCXP with over 15 years in financial services, payments and healthcare.
Patient Support Team Leader
Simply Contact
Team Leader at Simply Contact who started as a frontline agent. Leads the HATS Group account, handling non-emergency NHS patient transport bookings and eligibility checks.
EMEA GTM Leader, Sales Executive
Alvaria CX
Contact center and CX technology leader with 25 years in the industry, who has run enterprise CX business across EMEA at Alvaria. Earlier held senior roles at Siemens, Talkdesk and 8×8, and judges international CX awards.
