Humanizing Healthcare at Scale at CommonSpirit Health | Camille Haycock

In this episode of Humanizing Healthcare, we speak with Camille Haycock— Senior Vice President and Chief Patient Experience Officer at CommonSpirit Health — about what it actually takes to embed human kindness into the operational, cultural, and clinical fabric of a national health system.

CommonSpirit spans hospitals, clinics, and community care settings across more than two dozen states. Camille leads the enterprise-wide effort to make patient experience consistent, measurable, and mission-driven at that scale — not as a standalone initiative, but as an organizational imperative that lives at the board level alongside quality, safety, and financial performance.

She talks about why patient experience and quality can never be treated as separate workstreams, how her team turns 1,600 daily patient comments into actionable insight, and why the tactics for improving experience have to be tailored to each care setting — from inpatient units to emergency department hallways where patients are boarding for hours. She also shares what it looks like to teach human kindness systematically, and why the caregivers who drove 90 miles to a patient's funeral didn't do it because of a program.

If you want to understand how compassionate care gets operationalized across a complex system — and what leadership really looks like when kindness is the strategy — this is the episode.

🎧 Take a listen.

Key Takeaways:

03:00 Camille's path from clinical nursing to enterprise patient experience leadership

04:20 Why human kindness is embedded in CommonSpirit's organizational intent

05:50 Why patient experience and quality and safety cannot be separated

07:15 How CommonSpirit customizes experience improvement across five distinct care settings

08:30 Turning 1,600 daily patient comments into insight with AI and quantitative data

10:20 The Emmanuel Hospital story: what human kindness looks like in the final 19 days