What Healthcare Leaders Miss When They've Never Been the Patient | Stephanie Abbott

What Healthcare Leaders Miss When They've Never Been the Patient | Stephanie Abbott

From Humanizing Healthcare by Fidelum Health

March 31, 2026 · 28 min · Season 1 · Episode 34

About this episode

Stephanie Abbott discusses the insights healthcare leaders miss when they have never been patients themselves.

In this episode of Humanizing Healthcare, we speak with Stephanie Abbott — author, speaker, and former Chief Experience Officer — about what healthcare leaders miss when they've only ever seen the system from the inside. Stephanie spent years leading patient experience strategy at major health systems, including Adventist Health. She understood patient experience intellectually. Then she became a cancer patient — and realized how much she didn't know. She shares what it felt like to spend 63 days not knowing if she would survive, and 83 days waiting to start treatment. She explains why those gaps weren't failures of compassion — they were failures of design. And why fixing them requires more than launching a new PX program. This conversation gets into the difference between measuring satisfaction and understanding trust, why employee experience and patient experience can't be separated, and what it actually takes for leaders to build systems where compassion is sustainable — not just expected. If you want to understand what humanizing healthcare really demands of its leaders, this is the episode. 🎧 Take a listen. Key Takeaways 02:50 Stephanie's path from healthcare operations to…

People in this episode

Guest: Stephanie Abbott

Topics covered

  • patient experience
  • healthcare leadership
  • system design
  • compassion in healthcare
  • employee experience
  • trust vs satisfaction

Keywords

  • healthcare
  • patient experience
  • cancer patient
  • system design
  • leadership
  • compassion
  • employee experience

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Adventist Health

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