Inpatient Care

The inpatient environment is uniquely complex. Long lengths of stay mean there are many moments where the experience can go right... or wrong.

Patients arrive with fear, uncertainty, and a need to feel safe in someone else's hands.

The quality of care delivered during that stay matters enormously. But so does how it is communicated, how it is coordinated, and how it makes patients and families feel seen, heard, and cared for as human beings.

We help inpatient leaders and teams build the communication skills, collaborative care practices, and patient engagement habits that turn those moments into trust.

Survey performance — including HCAHPS — reflects the culture and behaviors your inpatient teams demonstrate every day. We help them make sense of the data, connecting what patients experience and report, with what your teams can do differently to improve not just scores, but a sustainable culture of care.

HXF Patient Experience Advisors support teams with:

• Nurse and physician communication — the most influential driver of inpatient patient experience and a core HCAHPS domains
• Hourly rounding, bedside shift report, proactive updates, and managing patient expectations across a full stay
• Care team coordination and huddles across shifts, units, and disciplines — reducing the confusion patients feel when handoffs are unclear
• Teamwork and communication: setting expectations, responding with empathy, and care coordination
• Discharge education and post-visit calls as an experience, not just a process — preparing patients and families with confidence and clarity to manage medications, navigate discharge instructions, and manage follow-up care.
• Engaging family members as partners in care, not afterthoughts
• Reducing noise, responding to call lights, and managing the environmental elements that affect patient rest and comfort
  
  

Emergency Department

Every ED patient arrives with uncertainty. What your team does in that moment defines the experience, and influences the outcome.

The emergency department is unlike any other care setting. Patients arrive without warning, often in pain, often frightened, and almost always without a clear understanding of what comes next. They remember their ED experience in vivid detail — from the check-in process, to the tone of the triage nurse's voice, to whether the provider explained what was happening, whether they felt like a priority, or if they felt their concerns were addressed.

Improving patient experience in the emergency department requires an understanding of its unique rhythms and pressures. We do not offer generic service training — we bring ED-specific frameworks for communication, empathy under pressure, and patient engagement that work within the actual demands of emergency medicine.

ED CAHPS performance is one dimension of what we work on, but it is not the starting point. We start with the patient's experience of arriving, waiting, being seen, discharged, and arriving home — and we help your teams make every one of those moments better.

HXF Advisors support Emergency Departments with:

• Managing the waiting experience: proactive communication, wait time transparency, and keeping patients informed with realistic expectations
• Caring communication — from the first human interaction that sets the tone for everything that follows, to the last.
• Empathy and de-escalation skills for staff managing frightened, frustrated, or high-emotion patients and families
• Explaining the plan of care: helping nurses and physicians communicate clearly and validate understanding when the path forward is still unfolding
• Comfort assessment and expectation management communication in a setting where patient skepticism is common and provider pressure is high
• Reducing left-without-being-seen (LWBS) rates through experience-driven operational improvements
• Discharge communication that patients and families actually understand — and leave feeling prepared
• Bridging the experience gap between ED and inpatient teams when patients transition from emergency to inpatient admission.
  
  

Medical Group, Outpatient & Ambulatory Surgical Centers 

Outpatient encounters are both high-volume and high-impact for patients—requiring speed to trust, respect, and consistent communication to support safe, confident care. 

Outpatient and ambulatory surgical settings present a distinct patient experience challenge: shorter encounters, fewer interactions, and the opportunity to make a strong impression that builds trust — or a lasting mistake — is compressed into a smaller window of time.

A patient visiting a medical group practice, a surgery center, or an outpatient clinic often has one or two meaningful interactions with your team. Those interactions carry enormous weight.

Schedules are tight, workflows are fast, and the temptation to prioritize tasks and efficiency over experience is real.

Our coaches and advisors help organizations recognize that efficiency and experience are not in conflict, but in fact, the communication practices and patient engagement habits that improve experience often reduce friction downstream.

HXF Advisors support Medical Group, Outpatient and Ambulatory teams with:

• Setting a strong first impression: scheduling experiences, pre-visit communication, and the moment a patient walks through the door
• Exam room communication — the quality of the patient-provider interaction and whether patients feel heard and respected
• Practice manager development to strengthen site leadership and performance outcomes
• Physician, APP, and Staff communication development and strengthening teamwork
• Managing access and wait time experiences in high-volume outpatient environments
• Pre-procedure preparation and patient anxiety management in ambulatory surgical settings
  
• Recovery and post-procedure communication: pain management expectations, discharge clarity, and follow-up planning
• Care coordination across the outpatient visit — from front desk, to clinical staff to provider, to referring specialist consults.
• CG CAHPS and OAS CAHPS domain education for medical group, outpatient and ambulatory surgical teams.
• Building patient loyalty in settings where patients have significant choice about where they receive care

LET'S GET TO WORK

We bring your teams together.

We understand that healthcare organizations face a unique set of challenges—the pace, the complexity, and the deeply human stakes. The pressure to deliver exceptional patient care doesn't pause while you're rebuilding culture, onboarding new leaders, or trying to re-engage a workforce that's given so much.

The most resilient healthcare organizations treat quality, safety, and patient experience as a unified system — not separate initiatives competing for attention and budget. When your teams share a common language and a common set of values, the whole organization performs differently. That's how organizations don't just improve — they transform.

Our coaches and advisors are experienced in working across levels, facilitating conversations that bridge hierarchy, and building the kind of organizational cohesion that makes everything work better.

• Leadership development, workshops and seminars
• Board, trustee, leader and employee retreats
• Culture assessment and process re-design
• CAHPS data analysis and improvement planning
• Virtual learning and certification courses
• Employee engagement
• One-on-one and group coaching
• Virtual learning and certificate courses
• Peer-to-peer and train-the-trainer programs