It's Time for a Chief Patient Officer in Every Healthcare Organization

Healthcare organizations exist to serve patients, and patient advocacy is still usually an afterthought. Every one of them needs a Chief Patient Officer or a Patient in Residence.

Healthcare organizations exist to serve patients, yet patient experience and advocacy are still routinely an afterthought behind revenue, regulation, and payer relationships. Every healthcare organization should have a Chief Patient Officer or a Patient in Residence whose actual job is representing the patient's interest in the room where decisions get made.

Some organizations are already doing this. Stanford Health Care runs a Patient & Family Partner Program putting patients and caregivers on real councils and committees. Cleveland Clinic has a Patient Experience Advisory Board. Sanofi appointed its first Chief Patient Officer in 2021. These are still the exception, not the norm.

A Chief Patient Officer's job is to center the patient perspective across every initiative, communication, and decision, not just the ones with an obvious patient-facing component. Concretely, that means simplifying bureaucratic processes based on real patient input, instilling compassion in interactions that have nothing to do with clinical care, from parking to billing, and getting patient stories in front of the people setting strategy, not just the people running the front desk.

A Patient in Residence does something related but different: an actual patient or caregiver embedded inside the organization, sitting in on rounds and committees, giving continuous feedback rather than a survey once a year. Mayo Clinic, Cleveland Clinic, and Mass General Brigham have all piloted versions of this.

The two roles complement each other. The Chief Patient Officer advocates from the executive level. The Patient in Residence connects the ground-level patient experience directly to the teams building the care.

I've held this role myself: first Patient in Residence for Sheba Medical Center, Tel Hashomer, and for the Ludwig Boltzmann Gesellschaft, and I currently hold it for Health Tech Without Borders. If your organization wants to build either role properly, that's a conversation I have often.