Empathy Is Something You Design, Not Something You Hope For: Adrienne Boissy on What Healthcare Can Teach Hospitality

At the EHL HumanX Summit in Lausanne, Simone Puorto sat down with Dr Adrienne Boissy, Chief Medical Officer at Qualtrics, a neurologist who still treats patients with multiple sclerosis, a former Chief Experience Officer of the Cleveland Clinic, an ethicist, and, by her own account, a washed-up ballerina who can also bartend. She brought healthcare's harder-edged view of experience to a room full of hoteliers, and the contrast between the two fields ran through the whole conversation. The full conversation is available to watch below.

What healthcare knows about empathy

Simone asked whether hospitality still misunderstands empathy and experience. Boissy started with what makes healthcare different: the gravity of it. People come to her for testing, for bad news, sometimes for the best moments of their lives, and that raises the stakes on trust. In healthcare, experience is not treated as politeness or warmth. It is counted as part of the quality of care, and in the United States hospitals are rated and reimbursed on how patients say they were treated. Underneath all of it, she said, trust is foundational, which is why she spends her clinical time listening closely, working out what the person in front of her values, and earning their trust.

She reached for a framework from Harvard's Frances Frei, who describes trust as resting on three things: authenticity, competence and empathy. The point is that they only work together. You cannot be an empathic but incompetent surgeon, and you cannot be empathic while delivering sloppy service. All three corners have to hold. The framework transfers to hospitality, she thinks, even if what competence means is different. One line she drew will sound strange to hoteliers raised on the opposite creed: in healthcare, the customer is not always right. She is focused on a patient's safety and the quality of their care, which sometimes means telling them what they do not want to hear.

That led her to a way of rescuing the word luxury, which she thinks implies a comfort healthcare rarely has, with fifty patients waiting in the corridor and no time for lunch. Reframe luxury, she suggested, as being deliberate about which human-to-human moments you protect and which you hand to technology to scale and make consistent. She credited a talk she once heard from the chief executive of Hyatt, called Reversing Perspective, which argued that the hotel is not so much the host of the guest as a guest in the visitor's life. She found it beautiful, and it is close to how she sees healthcare, where people rarely choose to be there and it is a privilege to be let in to witness their suffering. Her closing point here was practical. If conferences want human-centric leadership, they should name the specific skills that produce it, train people in them and check whether they are there, rather than leave humanity as a nice word.

Burnout is a system problem

Boissy's sharpest argument was that empathy can be built into a system rather than left to individuals. Simone put the romantic objection to her, that empathy cannot really be measured or scaled, and asked how she would win that argument. She said she tries hard not to. Convincing people rarely works, and human behaviour is hard to change.

Instead she points to evidence. A great deal of research on burnout shows that it is a system problem, not a lack of individual resilience. She described a bright-eyed medical student who wants to help people, goes into residency, ends up sleep-deprived and eating badly, does not see family for months, will not let teammates down, and witnesses death and trauma for the first time. The system slowly reshapes them into someone else. The evidence, she said, shows empathy declining around the third year of medical school and not recovering until late in a career, and the cost to the person, in errors, short tempers and strained relationships, is significant.

Healthcare's response is a discipline it borrowed from nuclear power and aviation, called high reliability: designing systems that are resilient and that look after the people inside them. The principles are concrete. A preoccupation with failure means actively hunting for the places someone might be harmed, since the front line usually knows where things break. A sensitivity to operations means building changes into how people already work instead of dropping a new policy on top of everything. And deference to expertise means asking the people who know the work best. Systems built this way protect people rather than blaming them. She does not hear hospitality talk in these terms, she said, where the hope is too often that the front-desk person has simply worked it out. The cost of not doing it shows up as quiet quitting and as turnover that can reach seventy or eighty percent, against healthcare burnout running near forty percent, itself far above where it sat in 2011.

The business case for human connection

Rather than argue, Boissy lets the numbers do the work, describing herself as someone happy to have the emotional conversation and then talk data. She looks at the brands that appear on the most-trusted, most-admired and best-places-to-work lists and also turn a healthy profit, and she collects examples of bold operational choices.

Her favourite is Delta, which lobbied its own board for more than a year to scrap in-flight Wi-Fi fees, on the grounds that the airline did not want to get in the way of human connection. That, she pointed out, is not an empathy slogan, it is an operational decision, and it reads as the company being empathic to a real customer frustration. It earned the airline hundreds of thousands of new loyalty members almost overnight and quickly offset the lost fee income. Smaller gestures count too. Some hospital systems, like University of Utah Health, have stopped charging for parking, because the brain remembers the peaks, the low points and the ending, and a thirty-dollar parking charge on the way out of a hard hospital stay is not a warm goodbye. Hilton, repeatedly named a top place to work, has joined up its customer and employee research and gives staff around a hundred and ten nights a year to stay in its hotels at a discount. Brands like the bakery Milk Bar even let customers opt out of Mother's Day emails if they have lost their mother.

The research backs the instinct. Customers who feel looked after come back, spend more, forgive mistakes several times more readily and tell other people, becoming ambassadors. She cited Fred Reichheld, who created the Net Promoter Score, on how much better the share prices of such companies perform over time, a multiple that Simone recalled being put as high as seventeen. The companies that invest in people, she said, outperform their peers, and that is measurable.

What we won't give to AI

For the HumanX question, Boissy was measured about technology. AI, she said, can become a glittery object that needs to be aimed at the problems that matter most to an organisation. She sees agents starting to handle basic service recovery, and the better brands using them to move upstream, solving a problem and then closing the loop on it consistently. The brands she rates listen across every channel, not only the surveys nobody wants to fill in but the unstructured signals, what people say when they call, complain or are asked in person, and they analyse all of it for a real understanding of the customer and then act. No team of humans can act on that volume of feedback alone, so agents will take on back-office work and the common service failures.

Her line in the sand is about what stays human. If we are smart, she said, we keep people for the most human work, which in healthcare means the moments of serious harm. Healthcare counts both physical and emotional harm, and she would like hospitality to talk about emotional harm too, because a service failure can cause it. For those moments, she wants the industry to put a stake in the ground about what it will refuse to do. What it should refuse, she said, is to replace the human-to-human moment, when a person needs another person most, with anything other than another person.