What Two ER Visits Taught Me About American Healthcare Leadership Failures

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.

Continuity removes the burden from the customer

In American healthcare, the norm is for patients to manage their own doctor referrals, track their own medical history, and even connect the dots to diagnose mystery symptoms.

In fact, a recent report from OpenAI showed that more than 3 in 5 American adults say they’ve used AI tools for their health or healthcare in the past three months. This phenomenon isn’t limited to healthcare. In business, more systems are shifting responsibility onto the customer, from self-checkout machines that always seem to malfunction to travel brands without a plan for customers when their flights get canceled.

These failures are compounded when customers are tired, stressed, or otherwise vulnerable, eroding their trust in the brand and impacting loyalty.

Whether they’re accessing healthcare or booking their vacation, customers should never have to act as their own coordinators. One straightforward solution for this fragmentation is to invest in interoperability. To return to my COVID experience in the ER, how many hours would I have saved if my medical records could have been shared between the two hospitals where I sought emergency care?

At Sollis, we recently introduced Metriport, a B2B medical API that securely exchanges our members’ medical records with their other providers. Not long after, one of our members came to us with severe back pain but couldn’t remember if she’d had an MRI within the past two years.

Using Metriport, we were able to quickly find that MRI, allowing us to directly refer her to an outstanding specialist without needing to wait for imaging. Thanks to this investment in interoperability, this Sollis member’s doctors had her vital medical data on hand when it was needed most.

Human connection shouldn’t be a luxury

While leadership means thinking about scale and optimization, it is first and foremost about stewardship: your customers rely on you to balance their experience with the best interests of the company.

Ensuring this means proactively designing systems that work hardest when the person using them is at their weakest — when they don’t have the energy to repeat their story to yet another representative, when they aren’t able to navigate a complicated membership platform, or when they’re struggling to remain motivated to use their membership. At times like these, customers need to be treated like a person.

When I was at Peloton, when we saw that a member stopped working out after regular usage of the membership, our team would reach out to ask if everything was okay and if we could assist in any way. Some of the responses were as expected, like the member was simply too busy traveling for work to keep up with their routine.

But other members shared that they had pulled back because of serious health scares or the loss of a loved one. When that happened, our team would take the time to respond with warmth and sympathy. In some cases, we would even send flowers or a personalized video message from their favorite instructor.

Over time, we saw that this human-centered outreach resulted in significantly higher rates of reengagement and, ultimately, retention.

Trust — not disruption — is what leads to growth

I didn’t become a healthcare leader because I wanted to disrupt the medical system—it was already disrupted by the lack of continuity and human-centered care that I experienced during my visits to the ER.

While my years of leadership experience have been invaluable in my career, they’re incomplete without the perspective that being a patient has given me. I know what it’s like to feel unseen when it matters most, which is why I’m a Trustee for the National Multiple Sclerosis Society; in fact, one key focus of our greater New York City chapter is providing resources to people living with MS in Queens and the Bronx, where there is less awareness, far fewer MS specialists, and far fewer clinical research sites than in Manhattan and Westchester County.

From connecting with my own and others’ humanity, I’ve come to believe that investing in equity and advocacy is integral to true leadership. Whether you’re building a healthcare company or a consumer brand, the lesson is the same: to feel human, the customer experience must be designed around continuity and trust.