Healthcare EX, PX, safety, workforce transformation, and operational leaders gathered in Chicago for the Healthcare Ex Consortium Spring Summit 2026 to compare notes on the workforce and operational pressures shaping the industry. Attendance was strong, the conversation was candid, and the recurring theme across keynote, panel, and breakouts was that the boundaries between employee experience and patient outcomes have effectively collapsed. Progress and pressure in one area tend to show up in the others, and the leaders at the Summit spent the day working through what that connection means for hiring, retention, manager development, psychological safety, and the technology choices ahead.
Laurie Pankow opened the Summit with a keynote on workforce systems and outcomes. Her core argument was that healthcare cannot operate from a neutral position on workforce strategy because the consequences of not acting compound across quality, safety, and financial performance. Fragmentation across HR, operations, quality, and L&D produces inconsistency that employees feel in their daily work, and leadership behavior is the largest single variable separating organizations that close that gap from those that do not.
The line that drew the strongest response from the room captured the same point in fewer words: strategies do not fail on paper, they fail in execution. Execution lives at the level of the individual manager and the team they lead, which is why so much of the rest of the day focused on manager capability as a leverage point.
The Summit also surfaced findings from Perceptyx's 2026 State of Healthcare Employee Experience research, drawn from 4.02 million respondents across 557 healthcare organizations. The data show genuine progress on several long-running operational complaints, with influence over physician practice rising 21.7 points and satisfaction with the balance between administrative tasks and patient care rising 17.2 points. At the same time, the typical healthcare organization lost ground on engagement for the first time since 2023, with the median dropping 2.9 points and intent to stay falling 3.0 points. Fear of asking questions when something seems wrong rose 15 points, and belief that feedback produces improvements fell 12.4 points. The full breakdown of where the decline is concentrated and why operational gains are not translating into better day-to-day experience is covered in our recent analysis of the 2026 healthcare benchmark.
This discussion brought together participants such as Sebastien Girard of Novant Health, Scott Bailey of Banner Health, David Gill of Northwell Health, and Keisha Mullings-Smith of UChicago Medicine for a conversation about how workforce strategy and operational performance influence one another. Rather than treating employee experience, patient experience, safety, and operations as separate tracks, panelists described how movement in one area tends to surface in the others. Much of the conversation was tactical. Leaders discussed the shift toward a well-being marketplace and what the next generation of healthcare workers will expect from an employer value proposition, and they worked through how organizations balance operational efficiency, workforce well-being, and long-term transformation at the same time. Several pointed to manager development as the practical lever, since the behaviors that link these areas play out at the team level. Attendees responded strongly to the practical specificity of the examples shared, and the LinkedIn reflections that followed the event emphasized the value of people-first leadership grounded in shared accountability across functions rather than housed within any single department.
The breakout sessions give HEX members time to spend with one another, which can often be the most valuable part of the consortium. They create space for healthcare leaders to share perspectives, compare what is and is not working, and learn from peers facing the same pressures, which is one of the cornerstones of why the consortium exists in the first place.
This year, the two sessions carried the day's larger conversation in different directions. The first session centered on collaboration across EX, PX, L&D, and Safety/Quality, with a clear pattern in the room: leaders described silos as the structural reason their initiatives lose momentum, and shared accountability as the only reliable counter. The second breakout focused on psychological safety, reliability, and speak-up culture, and surfaced an emerging consensus that high reliability has moved beyond compliance and into workforce and culture strategy. Perceptyx Senior Workforce Transformation Consultant Heather Sager's research on High Reliability Organizations was the catalyst for the strongest engagement of the day, particularly on the question of translating listening insights into operational action. The connections between employee experience, safety culture, trust, and engagement resonated with attendees whose organizations are actively rethinking how HRO principles intersect with their EX strategy, particularly given the 15-point rise in fear of asking questions documented in this year's healthcare benchmark.
Norton Healthcare received the 2026 HEX Champion Award, recognizing its role as a leading health system and a thought leader in healthcare employee experience. The award reflects years of active engagement in the consortium and an influence on the broader healthcare community that reaches well past Norton's own organization. Norton has shared its work through webinars, EX Impact Award submissions, and ongoing research conversations, taking a partnership-oriented approach and consistently making practical lessons available to peers facing similar challenges. Its example illustrates the connection between employee experience, well-being, recognition culture, and organizational outcomes, since the strongest healthcare organizations build recognition into the daily employee experience rather than treating it as a year-end exercise. Advancing healthcare employee experience is work the field does collectively, and recognizing organizations willing to share what they have learned — something Norton Healthcare goes above and beyond the call of duty to do — moves the whole community forward.
The closing conversation returned to a point several attendees made throughout the day: peer exchange is what makes the consortium useful, and the openness of leaders to share real challenges and lessons learned is what makes the exchange valuable. Continued healthcare research from Perceptyx will run alongside those events. Organizations interested in joining the Healthcare EX Consortium can find membership and event information on the consortium page, including how participating leaders contribute to and benefit from shared research, benchmarking, and discussion.
To discuss applying the findings from the HEX Spring 2026 Summit and the broader healthcare research to your own organization, schedule time with the Perceptyx team. Future HEX events have not been finalized yet, but Perceptyx will share the dates with consortium members as well as on LinkedIn once they are confirmed.