Richard Corder, has spent decades helping providers rethink what patient experience really means. In our recent conversation, he challenged the idea that safety, marketing, and patient experience live in separate lanes. Notably, he shared what happens when we start weaving them together.

Key Takeaways

If your marketing doesn’t match the lived experience, you’ve lost credibility. Brand stories that overpromise or ignore operational reality leave patients and families feeling misled. Marketing must be built with operations at the table. Safety is the experience, stop separating them. Patient safety is core to healthcare’s brand promise. Treating it as separate from experience leads to disjointed care and broken trust. Bring safety to the fore. Airlines talk about safety in every pre-flight message. Why don’t hospitals? Patients assume safety, but that doesn’t mean they don’t want to hear about it. There’s power in reinforcing what matters most. Branding without operational truth is a setup for failure

Corder didn’t mince words when talking about misaligned messaging. If your brand promises empathy, but your care delivery falls short, especially if a patient does not feel safe, then your organization is already in a trust deficit before that patient even hits the exam table.

“If your brand story is wildly misaligned with what the actual experience is like, then you have created a scenario where no one can trust or believe in what you do,” said Corder.

Safety is the experience

According to Corder, patient experience gets reduced to amenities and friendliness far too often. What matters most to patients is whether they will be okay when they leave your facility or practice. This is why Corder argues that separating safety from experience creates a false and dangerous dichotomy.

“You can’t serve your way out of a bad, unsafe situation,” stated Corder.

So while it is true that the healthcare experience starts on the website (or lobby), what happens in the OR has a much bigger impact.

Put safety at the front

Corder suggests that healthcare marketers should take inspiration from the airline industry. Airlines talk about safety on every flight as part of their pre-flight messaging. Safety is ingrained in every part of their operations. They make it clear once you are at the gate that this is a top priority. Yet, safety is rarely part of their marketing campaigns.

But maybe in healthcare marketing, safety should be a bit more prominent.

“One of the messages that marketers at healthcare organizations are not asked to put out into the public is safety,” explained Corder. “Yet that is something that as a patient I want above almost all else.”

The bottom line for Corder: make patients feel safe and secure during their visit.

Outcomes not optics

When patient experience is focused solely on optics instead of outcomes, it will eventually ring hollow. But when safety, staff empowerment, and storytelling are built into the same conversation, it resonates more deeply with patients. As Corder put it: “I want both a safe and good experience.”

Connect with Richard Corder on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/richardcorder/