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What Patient Experience Excellence Looks Like with Lara Burnside

September 29, 2022


Defining patient experience excellence is at the foundation of our Healthcare Experience Foundation partners’ Healthcare Experience Matters podcast interview this week with Lara Burnside. Lara is Senior Vice President, Chief Experience Officer with JPS Health Network in Texas. With 25 years of experience in this field under her belt, we are extremely excited for her inaugural appearance on the Healthcare Experience Matters podcast.

JPS is the public hospital in Tarrant County, Texas. It serves Fort Worth and the surrounding areas within Tarrant County. According to Lara, JPS currently has about 7200 employees and 1.2 million patient encounters throughout their hospital and clinics. JPS is the largest behavioral health provider in North Texas.

Lara has been a healthcare professional for more than two decades with experience in all levels of hospital leadership.

“I have been in healthcare for about 25 years, and I have spent my entire career in a people-centered way,” she said.

A top takeaway from our discussion with Lara is that engagement really matters when it comes to creating patient experience excellence.

“I really have learned that engagement matters, and whether it’s with patients, employees, or physicians, it matters,” she said.

As we learn through our discussion with Lara, her career has been focused on putting people first. Her goal in working with people has always been to help folks feel valued and honored. Through doing this she aims to put the people she works with in the best position to give their absolute best to patients, colleagues, and staff when they come into work.

“When I look back on my entire career, it really is about helping people find their passion. It’s about finding the purpose and helping people remember why they went into this in the first place,” she told us.

Helping her colleagues find that passion has been especially important these days with the ongoing challenges experienced in healthcare (and many other fields) in recent years, Lara told us.

“It’s time for people to really remember why they did this, and why they went into healthcare in the first place,” she said.

When Lara can help others find their passion, she knows she is in her element. She told us that helping others find their passion drives her to take on the challenges of her leadership position.

“We want every single person who walks through our doors to feel valued and honored and that they are being cared for in an individualized way, which is what every single person wants,” she said.

Listen to the podcast below: