At its core, healthcare is a people business. When organizations listen to patients and act on what they hear, they build trust and create a culture of continuous improvement. Providers that deliver seamless, consumer-friendly experiences don’t just meet expectations, they strengthen loyalty, reinforce their brand and position themselves more competitively in the market.
For ambulatory surgery centers, where patients may only interact with the organization once, experience has a direct impact on reputation, referral patterns and repeat utilization. Clear communication, predictable workflows and timely service recovery can influence not only satisfaction scores, but also downstream volume and brand perception in competitive markets.
Against this backdrop, many healthcare organizations are looking for more disciplined ways to capture and act on the voice of the patient.
To explore how one organization is doing just that, Becker’s Healthcare spoke with Jack Bretcher, chief operating officer at PartnerMD, and Paul Jaglowski, partner at Relias, about how patient feedback is shaping strategy, culture and performance at a multi-site concierge medical group.
Why patient experience drives performance across care settings
PartnerMD operates a network of seven concierge-style primary care practices across four states. Approximately 45 physicians serve between 14,000 and 15,000 patients, with each provider managing a smaller patient panel than in traditional primary care settings.
While PartnerMD’s care model is distinct, the underlying principle applies across healthcare settings, including ambulatory surgery centers: patient experience is inseparable from operational performance. Whether a patient interaction spans years or a single episode of care, trust, communication, and consistency shape satisfaction and outcomes.
“Experience isn’t just about how much time you spend with a patient,” Mr. Bretcher said. “It’s about whether expectations are set clearly and met consistently across every touchpoint.”
For ASCs and other ambulatory organizations, this reliability is especially critical. Patients may arrive anxious, time-constrained, or unfamiliar with the care team, making clarity, responsiveness, and seamless coordination essential to both satisfaction and efficiency. In settings where patients may never return for another encounter, each interaction carries outsized weight. A single breakdown in communication, scheduling, or discharge can define how the organization is remembered and whether it is recommended.
Mr. Bretcher noted that experience data plays a central role in PartnerMD’s ability to retain patients, boost referrals and quickly identify operational blind spots. The organization maintains roughly 97% controllable retention across its patient panel, reinforcing the link between experience and long-term performance.
While PartnerMD has long understood the importance of experience, leadership recognized that assumptions alone were insufficient. To ensure that operational processes consistently supported the patient journey, the organization sought clearer, real-time visibility into how patients experienced care across locations.
Using real-time feedback to uncover blind spots
Although PartnerMD performed strongly across several dimensions of the patient experience, leadership recognized there was room for improvement. To gain clearer insight, the organization partnered with Relias to implement a more structured, real-time approach to patient feedback using surveys and analytics.
“We all have blind spots,” Mr. Bretcher said. “We learn where those are through voice-of-the-customer feedback. That allows us to double down, come together as a team and figure out how to address those areas.”
After every appointment, patients receive a branded survey via email or text, asking about key aspects of their visit, from scheduling and wait times to time spent with clinicians and overall satisfaction. Responses are scored on a scale of 1 to 5, similar to promoter-style scoring, with PartnerMD’s goal set firmly at a 5.
Any rating of 4 or lower triggers immediate follow-up. Notifications are sent in real time to practice managers and C-level leaders, creating visibility and accountability across the organization.
“We set high expectations with patients,” Mr. Bretcher said. “If they spend more than five minutes in the waiting room, we deserve a less-than-5 rating. When that happens, we dig into why. That allows us to do service recovery much more efficiently.”
Turning insights into improvements
Beyond service recovery, patient feedback has become a strategic input into PartnerMD’s operational decision-making. When recurring feedback revealed that patients were frustrated by limitations around annual physical scheduling, the team used Relias data to re-evaluate appointment allocation and scheduling workflows.
“The commentary that patients share may show that something minor is off or flag recurring themes,” Mr. Jaglowski said. “Those insights can inform small workflow adjustments or more significant improvement efforts across the organization.”
Since implementing Relias surveys, PartnerMD has seen an 800% increase in patient feedback volume.
The importance of feedback
To build a culture of continuous improvement, PartnerMD ensures employees see how their work is experienced by patients. This transparency has allowed best practices to spread across offices and reinforced behaviors that support long-term member loyalty.
When PartnerMD increased membership prices at the start of 2025, leadership anticipated potential churn. As feedback data surfaced concerns among certain patients or cohorts, the team responded quickly. As a result, membership levels have remained steady.
A cornerstone of this cultural approach is celebrating positive feedback. Each month, PartnerMD distributes a company-wide “praise report” — a 15-page digest highlighting patient feedback by practice, functional area, referral coordinators and other roles.
Real-time recognition has also become routine. Each day, PartnerMD’s CEO reviews incoming feedback in Relias and sends personal notes to physicians, nurses and staff members, reinforcing the impact of frontline interactions.
“We take patient feedback about how staff are showing up and we celebrate people for it,” Mr. Bretcher said. “It’s a cycle that feeds on itself in the most positive way.”
Lessons for leaders
For organizations launching or refining a patient experience program, the first step is establishing a clear data-driven baseline. Mr. Jaglowski emphasized the importance of starting simply and using early insights to guide confident decision-making.
Rather than fixing everything at once, leaders should prioritize issues sequentially, resolve one area, then move to the next. Ensuring that both concerns and compliments are routed to the right teams is equally critical to turning feedback into action. For ASC leaders, this means using experience data not just as a report card, but as an operational signal to guide staffing, scheduling, patient communication and service recovery.
Patient insights can also be a powerful driver of culture. That means looking beyond clinical encounters to consider every human interaction along the patient journey. At PartnerMD, feedback revealed that a phlebotomist was among the organization’s strongest contributors to patient satisfaction, while deeper engagement by patient services representatives led to measurable gains in survey results.
Leading organizations are also extending the value of surveys beyond operational improvement. PartnerMD, for example, has added a simple checkbox to identify patients willing to participate in video testimonials, supporting marketing initiatives and patient advisory efforts.
Ultimately, patient feedback is the foundation of effective experience and operational strategies. When organizations consistently gather, share and act on patient insights, they strengthen service capabilities, reinforce culture and build momentum. As that flywheel begins to turn, patient experience improvements can scale, accelerating performance, reputation and long-term growth.
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