When Patient Experience Means Parking and Pianos, Plan Sponsors Pay for Hotels, Not Outcomes—What to Measure Instead, With Robyn Leone

Plan Sponsors Need Outcomes, Not Valet Parking: Build the Patient Journey in Three Buildings. Episode 535.

Is your patient experience strategy a piano in the lobby, or is it the right diagnosis, the right treatment, and a price the patient can afford? Robyn Leone, Chief Experience Officer at ZERO.Health, joins Stacey Richter to architect the patient journey as three buildings: access and navigation before care, delivery and care coordination during care, and transparent, accountable billing after. Stacey's bottom line: good intentions, clinician empathy, and customer service cannot overcome a bad structural design.

WHAT YOU'LL LEARN

✅ Why Robyn Leone defines patient experience as the right diagnosis at the right time, the right treatment, and care the patient can afford — not espresso machines, pianos, and valet parking

✅ The three-buildings framework: access and navigation, delivery and care coordination, and transparent billing with accountable settlement

✅ Why advanced primary care is the front door of building two, and how its absence shows up for employers as high ER rates, high specialist costs, and duplicate services

✅ How surprise bills (expecting $50, getting $900) and slow carrier payment push clinicians to demand upfront payment

✅ Four questions for plan sponsors: primary care spend, chronic condition utilization, what is paid for high-volume services like MRIs, CT scans, MSK procedures, and specialty infusions, and the gap between what was paid and what the provider received

✅ Why clinicians weighing direct contracting should ask vendors for median days to payment, not target days

WHY THIS MATTERS

Healthcare is slightly obsessed with the real estate kind of architecture, with lots of marble and waterfalls and fancy art, while patient experience measures end up better suited to a hotel than a hospital. Patient experience is a direct operational consequence of the architecture underpinning the patient journey, and plan sponsors get what they pay for, intentionally or otherwise. Direct contracts, steering and tiering, and measurable advanced primary care set the default to the right diagnosis and the right treatment at a fair price.

=== LINKS ===

🔗 Show Notes with all mentioned links

🔗 ZERO.health

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MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE

Robyn Leone on LinkedIn

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00:00 Introduction to this episode.

03:10 What the measure of patient experience should be.

04:19 A summary of today's discussion.

06:24 The conversation with Robyn Leone.

07:23 The danger in focusing on atmospheric improvements in regard to the patient experience.

09:38 How to think about measuring health outcomes in regard to the patient experience.

10:57 The three parties that need to be aligned.

16:10 What needs to happen from a patient perspective.

21:25 What happens to patient experience in relation to billing.

28:03 Where plan sponsors should start when thinking about measuring patient experience.

35:47 How ZERO.health works in all of this.