Press Ganey CEO On Qualtrics Deal: AI Market Is “Extremely Competitive”

This is a preview of the October 9 edition of Access Health—Tap here to get this newsletter delivered straight to your inbox.

I got an interesting email this morning.

Usually, the “interesting” items in my inbox are news tips, embargoed AI announcements and comments I’ve been expecting. But today, among the usual suspects, there was a message from a Gmail account.

“I’d like to arrange a doctor’s appointment,” it read, asking me to send times for my next available consultation.

It’s a little funny in isolation. But I’ve gotten several of these emails in my time covering health care—patients who searched “health care” or “doctor,” found my author page and decided to shoot me an email without reading too far into my credentials. Spoiler ahead: they do not include “MD” or “DO.”

I’m not sharing this to poke fun at these misguided messages. I myself am no tech savant, and still get confused when I have to power up a TV using more than one remote.

Rather, I think this speaks to a larger issue in the health care industry. Despite all of the efforts devoted to online appointment scheduling, user-friendly patient portals and 24/7 call centers (some of which are now powered by AI agents), there is still a portion of the population that doesn’t know how to navigate the system.

I don’t know exactly how my Gmail friend landed in my Outlook, but the possibilities are endless. Maybe they did try to make an appointment with a local physician and were among the 1 in 5 patients who had to wait between 1 and 3 months to be seen. Perhaps they still haven’t attempted to schedule online—43 percent of patients haven’t, and many are unfamiliar with their provider’s web scheduling platform, according to a recent survey from Jarrard. Or they could be a Medicaid patient, a population that is half as likely to secure a primary care appointment compared to their commercially-insured counterparts, and about three times less likely to successfully book a specialty care appointment. I wouldn’t be surprised to see those numbers increase as Medicaid rollbacks heighten uncertainty around care coverage.

On Wednesday, I spoke with Patrick Ryan, chairman and CEO of Press Ganey (read on to the Pulse Check section for his insights into the Qualtrics acquisition announced this week). He shared that his organization’s insights from other industries, like retail, insurance and financial services, are being used to shape the customer experience in health care.

“A lot of my health systems say, ‘we want to be like Amazon,’ or, ‘we want to be like Best Buy,’ where people can transact digitally,” Ryan said. “I would say the entire industry has moved in that direction, having watched it take place first in the consumer area.”

While the effort to engage patients virtually is present—and has been proven successful at some health systems—that email today reminded me of a presentation I saw at the Illinois Hospital Association’s Leadership Summit a few weeks ago. The speaker, Craig Deao, managing director at the consulting firm Huron, referenced the ease with which people can find goods and services in other sectors. If you want to order a pizza, Papa John’s will give you status updates every step of the way. You’ll know when it’s being made, baked and boxed, and then can track your driver every inch of their delivery route.

Health care isn’t quite there yet.

“At some point, people will access care how they want, when they want, where they want, for the price they want,” Deao said, “and they’ll get it from you or from someone else.”

Hopefully, we’ll get to a point where I won’t be that someone else.

In Other News

Major health care headlines from the week

• What does the hospital of the future look like? That’s the question I set out to answer with my latest feature piece for Newsweek. I spoke with leaders and designers at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center to learn how they’re conceptualizing their new Kenneth C. Griffin Pavilion, a $2.3 billion, 27-story patient tower in New York City’s Upper East Side.
• Modular rooms, high-tech ORs and staff respite rooms are all part of the design. But one of the highest aspirations for this high-rise hospital is to give patients a sense of control. Click here to read the full story and see exclusive renderings of the proposed Pavilion, which is slated to open for business in 2030.

• Amazon Pharmacy is launching a prescription kiosk system in its One Medical offices,starting in the Los Angeles area in December. Once a provider writes a prescription, patients can choose to send it to the Amazon Pharmacy kiosk in the office and pick it up in minutes, without an additional trip to the pharmacy.
• “We know that when patients have to make an extra trip to the pharmacy after seeing their doctor, many prescriptions never get filled,” Hannah McClellan, vice president of operations at Amazon Pharmacy, said in a news release shared with Newsweek. “By bringing the pharmacy directly to the point of care, we’re removing a critical barrier and helping patients start their treatment when it matters most—right away.”

• The White House has started advancing new changes to the H-1B visa program, including a $100,000 fee for new applicants: a significant increase from the previous fee of between $2,000 and $5,000. Medical colleges and associations are speaking out against the reforms, arguing that they will complicate the hiring of foreign doctors amidst the physician shortage.
• About 9,000 physicians in the U.S. are currently certified for H-1B visas, according to the most recent data from the Labor Department.
• In other government news, Defend Public Health, a volunteer network of public health professionals and advocates, has started posting a Robert F. Kennedy Jr. “Whopper of the Week,” calling out unsubstantiated health claims made by the HHS secretary. This week’s whopper focuses on his assertion that babies should not be vaccinated against hepatitis B.
• Plus, six former Surgeon Generals issued a “joint public health warning” on Tuesday, writing, “It’s our duty to warn the nation about RFK Jr.” Read their full op-ed at The Washington Post.

• Existing treatments for chronic pain aren’t serving patients as well as they could be. New research from Cleveland Clinic substantiates an alternative solution: ketamine. On Sunday, the health system releasedone of the largest studies to date showing that ketamine—historically used as an anesthetic and, by some, as a party drug—is “both safe and significantly effective” for chronic pain patients.
• Researchers observed more than 1,000 pain patients across five consecutive days of low-dose ketamine infusions. Up to 46 percent of the patients saw “meaningful improvements in their daily functioning, sleep and pain management,” according to Cleveland Clinic, which also noted high patient adherence to the protocol.
• There were sustained benefits in the six months following the infusions, and nearly half of the patients showed “clinically meaningful improvement” in pain-related anxiety, Cleveland Clinic said.
• Ketamine is currently used off-label for pain as researchers build the case for broadening FDA approval. This study suggests the drug could make an impact for some of the 60.3 million Americans who experience chronic pain.

Pulse Check

Executive perspectives on key industry issues

On Monday, the software group Qualtrics announced that it would acquire Press Ganey—an industry leader in patient experience, employee engagement and care quality data analytics—for $6.75 billion.

I sat down with Press Ganey Chairman and CEO Patrick Ryan yesterday to get a behind-the-scenes look at the acquisition and a forecast for the future. He told me that Qualtrics and Press Ganey will continue to compete “head-to-head” as they wait for regulatory approval, but that eventually, they expect Press Ganey to become the health care division within Qualtrics: keeping the “PG” brand that customers have grown to trust, but enhancing it with new capabilities from their parent company.

Find a portion of our interview below.

Editor’s Note: Some responses have been edited for length and clarity.

Give me the origin story of this Qualtrics acquisition, Pat. When did the possibility first come on your radar?

We started talking to Silver Lake [Qualtrics’ parent company]. They reached out to us in the late May, early June timeframe, talking about the opportunity. And it progressed through the summer and got momentum, really in the late August, early September time frame.

What appealed to you about their pitch?

We were originally approached by Silver Lake, which owns Qualtrics, and they’re very solid and maybe one of the preeminent investors in technology, and we have always respected Qualtrics and [CEO] Zig [Serafin] and his team.

As we look towards the next two to five years, we recognize the market is going to be extremely competitive, and to win in that marketplace, you’re going to need to be able to invest heavily in artificial intelligence and agentic agents and continue to evolve your product lines. And the concept of us coming together, I think, positions us better to compete with what we’re seeing in the market: the entrance of dozens of native AI companies being invested in Silicon Valley, and then you’ve got the large competitors in Oracle and Microsoft and Google that you always need to keep an eye on. So I think it allows us to be competitive in a dynamically changing marketplace.

What exactly is the benefit of syncing with a company like Qualtrics, as opposed to building those capabilities out internally with Press Ganey’s existing infrastructure?

We have substantial investments in technology, AI, natural language processing, reputation management, so it’s really a combination of two companies with great tech, but we need to refocus and/or focus our investments on AI. We both have products that are driven by it now, but we’re at the very early innings of the era of intelligence.

And I think the reality of the combination is that we have tremendous intelligence within Press Ganey. We’ve got 40 years of history serving patients and health systems, and then we’ve got 25 percent of our business in the cross-industry space serving companies like FedEx, Best Buy, etcetera.

And when you think of combining their data trove with our data trove and being able to invest heavily in our technology, it’s really positioning the organizations to double the amount of dollars we can put towards investment. I think that’s the thesis here. This really allows us a path to investment and to accelerate our development of technology, to drive innovation for our clients, both in the cross-industry space and in the health care space.

Is it fair to say that in the AI era, having a breadth of data is seen as a competitive advantage?

Well, you know, AI is only as good as the data that is fed into the models. And having that is a real advantage for Press Ganey in the space. We’ve been built by health care professionals to serve health care professionals over the years. And so our expertise and our data set gives us a unique advantage.

Combine that with the tech-forward view of Qualtrics and the tech that we bring to the table, it gives us the opportunity to both focus our investment and expand our investment into the AI space and allows us to accelerate our product roadmaps.

What can Press Ganey’s health care customers expect in the wake of the acquisition?

The combination of the two companies is going to take some time. We need regulatory approval to go through with this, so we’ll continue to compete head-to-head with them [Qualtrics] in the near term.

Once we get that approval, we will sit down and build out a plan over the next two to three years, and it’ll be a very logical, thoughtful process. In the meantime, we’ll continue to give them [Press Ganey customers] a great service and deliver on the products that we have for them, and continue our mission. The reality is, this is a very mission-driven company. We always have been. Our goal has been, from a health care perspective, to change the human experience and ensure that everyone receives safe, appropriate care. We’ve been able to change the trajectory up here in these 40 years, and we’re going to continue to pursue that mission.

What do you see as the specific areas of Press Ganey’s business that are most ripe for AI innovation?

AI is going to have a dramatic impact on the world and how we receive information. For us, we believe that we will be able to move towards a predictive state where, when Pat Ryan walks into a health system, the system knows who I am, knows what my challenges and issues might be, and knows how to address my care in a very specific way. And because of the data they [the health systems] have, they’ll be able to ensure that it is safe, that the employees in that organization feel safe, because they understand what is occurring there, and that I get the greatest possible outcome—all because the data will direct them to it.

Imagine for a moment that we will have agentic agents working for health systems 24/7, looking at what’s going on within their safety data, looking at what’s going on within their experience data, looking at what’s going on within their employee engagement data, and sharing that in a way to direct the hospital towards opportunities to improve things that aren’t going very well. It’ll literally become the most important operating data in the health system.

Do you have any advice for health systems that are considering a data-sharing partnership with another organization?

The issue of data protection and security is always critical, and it’s really table stakes in any business that is in the analytics world. You know, we bought 22 companies over the last 14 years. And I would say all of the early-stage tech companies that we acquired had a security issue that needed to be addressed, that a level of investment in security was not there.

I know in the combination with Qualtrics and with Press Ganey, we have the highest level of security certification. That’s an advantage for us. And I think as anyone makes investments going forward and looks at partners, you want to make sure the table stakes are covered with regard to the highest level of data security. We have that.

That would be my advice: as you choose partners, make sure that the product is, in fact, secure. You know that the reality is, there are dozens of these companies. There will be dozens more, and the rate at which they’ll come and go will also be high in that process.

C-Suite Shuffles

Where health care leaders are coming and going

• Highmark Health in Pittsburgh appointed Karen Hanlon as its president, effective Wednesday. She will also continue in her current role as the organization’s chief operating officer.

• Two major children’s hospitals named new CEOs this week. Shannon Sullivan will become the new president and CEO of Connecticut Children’s in Hartford, effective January 12, 2026. She most recently served as president and chief operating officer of Care New England Health System’s Women & Infants Hospital. And Seattle Children’s tapped Dr. Christopher Longhurst for the CEO role after a year-long executive search. He’ll be moving up the West Coast from UC San Diego Health, where he currently works as chief clinician and innovation officer, and will assume the new position on January 5, 2026.

• Community Health Network in Indianapolis promoted its Chief Transformation Officer Dr. Patrick McGill to the helm. He’ll succeed current President and CEO Bryan Mills, who plans to retire at the end of the year.

Executive Edge

How health care execs are managing their own health

On October 1, Dr. John D’Angelo began his tenure as president and CEO of Northwell Health, the largest health care provider in New York State—which got even larger in May following a merger with Connecticut-based Nuvance Health.

I sat down with D’Angelo six days into his new role to discuss what’s coming next for the health system, which was previously led by Michael Dowling. I’ll share more of our interview in the Pulse Check section of next week’s newsletter, but there’s one snippet I’d like to give you today.

I asked D’Angelo how he takes care of his own health while managing a new, busy schedule, and how he ensures that he’s always on the top of his game. Here’s what he told me:

Editor’s Note: Responses have been lightly edited for length and clarity.

“I love that you asked that question. That’s been a real focus of mine.

And I actually just did a new employee orientation with 180 people yesterday, and I told this story. I told it on a virtual town hall with thousands of our leaders maybe a month ago. I really would like this to be part of whatever word you want to use: my brand, my focus.

I’ve had leadership growth at scale over the last 25 years. And in retrospect, that wasn’t my plan, but the journey I had was perfect to lead me up to this point with growth and scale of responsibility.

But earlier in my career, I lost focus of my own health and when I would take on these new roles—whether it was my first time running a single department, or whether it was going into the role of running all of emergency medicine for the health system, including EMS and emergency disaster preparedness—typically in those transitions, I sacrificed my own well-being and burned the candle at both ends. I put on a lot of weight, and maybe wasn’t as present at home as I should have been, and things of that nature.

And then back in 2015—call it getting older—but yeah, I just made a commitment [to change]. And it’s now been almost 10 years. I dropped 60 pounds, came off all my medications that I was on at the time.

My wife joined me on this journey, and it wasn’t just about our physical health and well-being, which we prioritize, but I also have learned to be successful despite the enormity of my roles, and I plan on doing nothing different this time around—while also making sure I’m fully present at home, that I’m my best self at home, so I can be my best self at work. I’m not going to hide. I’m going to celebrate the fact that I’m still going to go on vacation with my family, that I’m still going to make it a priority on the weekends to be on the field [for] my daughter’s lacrosse [games] as an example.

And I think if I set that tone from the CEO position, it not only gives people permission, but it highlights to them that I value this and I want to encourage them. And also as an organization, we need to put a strategy in place beyond what we do today. We do a lot today around our employees, health and well-being. But what else can we do, do we need to do? How do we bring that to another level? It’s something I’m very focused on, and I really would like it to be part of my CEO ‘platform.'”

There was only one Belgian hospital on Newsweek’s 2026 Best Smart Hospitals ranking. Before you go, check out this article by Christophe Mouton, CEO of Maria Middelares in Gent, Belgium, and a member of Newsweek’s CEO Circle, to hear how his hospital rose to the top.

This is a preview of the October 9 edition of Access Health—Tap here to get this newsletter delivered straight to your inbox.