Welcome to my blog dedicated to patient experience, though at times it will be patient experience (PX) broadly defined. My interest here is not just to share stories, examples and suggestions, but to really dive into elements of PX that are not often discussed. I am also working on a book on patient experience, so this will be a place to explore some of those topics in a more conversational tone and without filter. I know it will take some time to acquire interested readers, but I also hope to use this space to answer questions and engage in conversations with you.
My plan is to update this blog three times a week, Monday, Wednesday and Friday, though this may change as I generate a critical mass of content that I hope will encourage you to come back. Plus, when it comes to search-engine optimization, it appears that based on various metrics, blog posts of 1000-2000 words are optimal, meaning fewer longer entries is preferred over more quick-hit entries. Those who know me well know that I might tend to use ten words where two may suffice, so that is not likely to be a significant issue. My primary concern here is to share my ideas and not monetize content. If I write things worth reading, the rest will take care of itself. If those things are lengthy or brief, well, the topic should drive the presentation.
While a vast majority of early readers will be here because they know me, for those who do not, here are a few, perhaps useful, facts about me. I wanted something more personal than the usual boilerplate blurb that you might get at a conference, but some may find it to be a bit TMI. My essential point is to give you some sense of my background and help you determine if my opinion is worth reading on a regular basis.
My name is Joseph Snipp. If you had told me when I was a freshman in college that I would become a passionate advocate for patients, I might have believed you, but I also would have thought it would be because I washed out of everything that was on my wish-list. I graduated from Creighton University (Fly, Jays!) with a major in Political Science and co-majors in Philosophy and Computer Science. These all interested me but felt at times disjointed. When I got to graduate school, the use of data and statistical modeling in social science was becoming very popular, and I really gravitated towards the math in social science. And so began my life at the intersection of math and human nature. There was something comforting (and still is) about realizing that human nature is not random, but instead predictable, even as that predictability required balance between the predictive strength and the cumbersomeness of a variable list.
I ended up teaching political science full- and part-time, as well as starting a research firm that focused on providing specialized research for companies that could not afford marketing firms. From there, I got a job at a national research firm (Professional Research Consultants) that specialized in surveying the patients, employees and physicians in healthcare as a data analyst.
As it became evident that I could talk about math without making people’s eyes roll back in their head, I started talking to clients about our process as well as doing a lot of research determining the impact (or lack thereof) of patient demographics, hospital demographics, survey length, lag between discharge and survey, etc. and then explaining it in whitepapers and presentations. Having literally millions of patient interviews with dozens of questions was dizzying, even if it meant that I had to seriously upgrade my data engineering skills. All of that was self-taught, and by reading other people’s code. Probably the only time I have used my computer science background was in reading hundreds of lines of code to figure out what part I needed to tweak to get it to do what I wanted it to do.
That quickly led me to lots and lots of travel. After about four or five years, I calculated that I had been on the road for 400 days and I kept that pace up for another ten or so years. Long enough to be loyal to and then break up with three or four airlines. This experience was critical as spending time on three, four or even five hospitals in a month allowed me to microwave my speaking ability, as speaking to bored doctors and c-suite folks is similar to but distinctly different from talking to bored freshmen. Plus, I saw how hundreds of hospitals approached the same work, even how different hospitals in the same system approached the work. The stories I harvested and retold opened other opportunities of learning, as I could hear out Hospital B responded to what I learned last month at Hospital A.
And then, there was the dark night of the professional soul. I was at the Hilltop Pub and Grill in Stevens Point, Wisconsin having dinner alone. It was a burger, homemade potato chips and a local beer (I would recommend, if you are in the neighborhood.) I had been on the road for a couple of days and would be on the road for a few more. I was reflecting upon my work done and work left to do and I could not remember where the hell I was. This dinner was a carbon-copy of dozens of meals I had eaten over the last decade or so and at that moment, they all bled together and rushed over me and I didn’t know where I was. That moment passed and I knew where I was, but that ten milliseconds felt like an eternity. I needed to make a change.
Luckily that change presented itself, as a job as the Director of Clinical Data Analytics posted with a health system in the Midwest. I certainly understood math, and if they wanted to take a chance on someone with no clinical experience, but a wealth of experience with 1s and 0s, it felt like the jump-without-a-net I was looking for. One thing that I really appreciated about that health system and my boss was that they were interested in talent with non-standard points of view. She had a few people under her that had no healthcare experience, but brought their skills in process-improvement or data analytics to the work.
That was certainly a learning curve. Every industry has its acronyms, but healthcare has a amazing array, and those in healthcare will toss them around casually and quickly. One of the first meetings I had, there was concerned conversation about how the ‘high’ numbers were troubling. I was thinking, “OK, but what high numbers?”, only to realize that they were talking about HAI numbers (hospital acquired infections.) Having to report out monthly on CLABSI, CAUTI, ADE, SIR, and a hundred others forced me to quickly up my letter-game.
From there, I became the Vice President of Patient Experience and Consumerism. It was a job I was suited for and, after three years in Quality, I had established good relationships with many of the key players. It is a job that I would have been far less capable of managing had I got it as my first job at that health system. Here, though, the Fates would give me a precious gift. I got the job in early 2020, mere minutes before COVID shut the world down. I will likely write a lot more about my feelings and observations about the impact COVID had and continues to have on patient experience. For the moment, though, I will say that it immediately changed how we spoke of PX. No one could go into a patient room without personal protective equipment (PPE), visitation was shut down, agency staff was the only way to keep up with needs (which itself created its own vicious cycle as staff nurses saw how much agency nurses were making and decided to jump-ship for the more lucrative space with fewer organizational constraints.) The existing staff was feeling especially brittle so leadership was not interested in forcing them into PX-themed processes, which they could not easily do because you only went into rooms when you had to in order to preserve the precious PPEs.
Through that, the system more than doubled in size. I guided the patient experience, patient advocacy and civil rights/1557/patient access work, as the growth necessitated those things find a system home instead of the patchwork of hospital ownerships. In September 2025, I left that health system.
Which brings me to this moment. The point of this summary (and indeed the point of this blog) is not to make me sound awesome. I plan to speak my truth, even if it doesn’t always put me in the best light. I do, though, think that my experience (with data, with people, as a consultant, as an employee, as a leader, as a follower, as a good cop, as a bad cop) gives me a perspective not often found in this space. It is my sincere hope that my experiences and my thoughts are useful. Whether they be an inspirational guiding light or a cautionary tale will be determined by you.
In the end, I would like to call out a few people who have been instrumental in bringing me to this place. The problem with lists like this is that those left off may feel a certain kind-of-way. To those, I preemptively apologize. Not mentioning you here is not meant as disrespectful. I reserve the right to call you out in other posts and in the book. Until then, you can certainly post a comment saying what a horrible person I am. So, in chronological order (with a couple of exceptions) …
James Wunsch: One of the many college professors who inspired me, but I call him out here for something perhaps a bit less soaring, but instrumental to my success (such as it is.) He taught me Conservative Political Thought and he assigned us all to write weekly 1000-word essays on the material covered. The thought of writing 1000-word essays every week terrified me, but by the end of the semester, I realized that he gave me a foundational skill—quickly summarizing key concepts and building to conclusions with the written word. Anyone who has read a whitepaper of mine or has received a lengthy but well-organized email from me on some complex topic can thank Jim. Or curse him. Your choice.
Shawn Bowler: A grad-school professor who taught me how to build out databases beyond what was available and, perhaps more importantly, taught me that sometimes you just need to DO it and not spend too much time THINKING about it. Yes, you will make some mistakes, and you might have to restructure things, but letting perfect be the enemy of the good will lead to a lot of staring at a blank piece of paper.
Greg Brown: My first boss at PRC and now a dear friend. I was self-taught on database engineering mostly by cribbing code that Greg wrote while HE was teaching himself database engineering. I might blame him for my clunky code, except that he exhibits something I don’t have in abundance, the patience to make it elegant. I had the desire to get it done, so I could do the fun sexy work of data analytics. And if you raise an eyebrow on sexy being tagged to analytics, I simply say IFKYK.
John Gnida: The head of the PRC client education department who saw my skills and let me hone them by sending me to every town on the but-not-the list, as in “I am sending you to Jacksonville, but not the one in Florida, and then Albany, but not the one in New York…” Sending me to every place he didn’t want to go gave me the experience I spoke of earlier. I don’t even begrudge the fact that he sent me to Madisonville, KY while he went to Monterrey, CA or the fact that his wife, Jan, actually got me blackballed from my first attempt to work at PRC. Yeah, Jan, I still remember that…
Hope Brown: There were a lot of great people I worked with in Client Education—like Audrey Page, Teira Gunlock, Christy Foster-Harris, Nancy Miller, Sandy Bakke—and I learned a ton from all of them. But Hope Brown deserves special call-out here. I learned a lot about client relationship-building from her and she is never afraid of me and will push back on things. We have had some impressive fights over data, and I will tip my cap, as she won one or two of them. Her attention to detail is impressive and I long to be as professional and put-together as she is.
Candice Quinn: Not the first boss I had at PRC, but the one that taught me the most about how to function in a matrixed organization. She taught me how to channel my dominant personality into a corporate structure. I learned a lot of how to embrace external realities while driving conversations with leaders from her.
Katie: She rolls her eyes when I say it, but she is way-smarter than I am. I hope that I give her as much good advice as she has given me over the past five years. She would balk at me saying she gave me permission to enter this phase of my life, but her support is essential to all that I hope to accomplish.
My parents: You might think that two people with chemistry PhDs might be a bit disappointed with their social science son, but nothing could be further from the truth. Their unwavering support for me and my occasionally suboptimal decision-making has allowed me to make mistakes, learn from them and move on. I cannot imagine having more supportive and understanding parents. Anything that I am or will become is because I had the good fortune to stand on the shoulders of giants.
PX Matters with Joseph Snipp 
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