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Key Takeaways People shouldn’t have to coordinate their own care or experiences — especially when they’re sick or stressed.
Loyalty comes from empathy and trust.
All it takes is one bad experience to reveal a system’s underlying dysfunction. And when that system is important to your quality of life — like your workplace, your school or the hospital that’s providing you with healthcare — that dysfunction can quickly become a nightmare, especially when you’re already tired, stressed or sick.
While I knew that living with a chronic illness can make healthcare access more challenging, I didn’t truly understand that vulnerability until the first time that I came down with COVID-19 after my diagnosis with multiple sclerosis (MS).
Because my MS treatment includes drugs that suppress my immune system, COVID hit me hard in 2021, sending me to the emergency room at the height of the pandemic — twice.
At my first visit, the doctors confirmed my diagnosis with a PCR test, but the monoclonal antibody treatment I needed wasn’t available onsite.
They discharged me with a phone number for a state healthcare agency that I couldn’t use because their offices were closed…on a Tuesday. Forced to reach out to my neurologist to help advocate for my care, I drove two hours to a different ER, where I spent nine hours waiting for my medication because the hospital wouldn’t accept my positive COVID test from another hospital system — despite both hospitals using the same electronic medical records (EMR) system.
With those two ER visits, I saw firsthand how disconnected care, siloed medical data and impersonal system design put the burden on the sick person to manage their own treatment. Now, as the CEO of Sollis Health, I’ve come to view that stressful experience as a watershed moment for my role as a healthcare leader.
After 20 years of creating seamless, loyalty-building customer experiences across brands, it taught me that systems characterized by fragmentation and impersonal service will fail people at their most critical moments — but that with the right approach, it’s possible to build connected, human-centered experiences in any industry.
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