Lara Burnside

Lara Burnside has spent the last 25 years creating workplaces that honor and value every person – whether they are a patient, employee or clinician.

Her early career in human resources taught her the importance of a people-first mentality. Lara has built human resources and patient experience departments from the ground up – achieving recognition of the Malcom Baldrige Quality Award, one of the highest national honors.

Lara’s patient experience career began in 1996, and she has worked tirelessly since then to ensure that every patient receives the most excellent experience during the most vulnerable time of their life. She honed her skills for over a dozen years as a healthcare consultant, teaching the value of implementing practical tips and tools that provide exceptional patient care. By tapping into clients’ passion and purpose, she achieved top quartile performance and beyond in more than 200 hospitals across the United States. With a focus on physician/clinician engagement, she has helped organizations increase wellbeing and engagement, resulting in top-decile engagement levels.

The last decade of Lara’s career has been spent as a senior leader in the hospital setting, where she created and developed patient experience divisions that embrace best-practice tactics proven to engage patients as partners in their care. This level of excellence led to a public hospital system being recognized by the Lown Institute as the number one hospital for patients in the United States.

Lara’s love and desire for people to do and be their best motivated her to develop training programs for leaders, employees and clinicians. The Patient Experience Mastery Program for leaders and clinicians achieved profound results – improving every question on the patient experience survey by an average 6.5% top box points and NPS scores by 4.3 points in a twelve-month timeframe.

Beckers Healthcare has recognized Lara three times as one of the nation’s leading CXO’s.