Leading for Exceptional Patient Experience (Pre-order)

Coming Spring 2027. This is a pre-order and will ship when available.

Nurses and Physicians Are Held Accountable for Patient Experience. Almost None of Them Were Ever Trained in It.

For more than four decades, Thom Mayer, MD, and Ori Litvak, MBA, have worked to close that gap. Their answer is Survival Skills™, a patient experience course modeled on advanced cardiac life support (ACLS) and advanced trauma life support (ATLS): evidence-based, proven at the bedside, and taught by clinicians who do the work. It began in a busy Level I trauma center, where staff first dismissed it as “charm school.” The results changed their minds, and the program has since reached tens of thousands of healthcare professionals across the country.

Leading for Exceptional Patient Experience is the complete playbook. It does not add another task to an already-full shift. It gives teams better ways to do the work they already do, guided by one principle: make the job easier while making patients’ lives better.

Inside, you’ll learn how to:

• Recognize how much of each person in front of you is patient and how much is customer, and treat each part with the right skills
• Discover, negotiate, and exceed the expectations every patient brings to an encounter
• Put the three A-team behaviors into practice: sit down and make eye contact, listen actively, and offer a blameless apology
• Replace norm-based percentile scores with an open-book test approach where every team can earn an A
• Hire for the patient experience “gene,” reward your champions, and address B-team behavior directly
• Hardwire flow, battle burnout, and restore your team’s adaptive capacity

With 17 field-tested tools and free slide sets for training your own team, this is a practical guide for every clinician and leader who believes exceptional care should come with an exceptional experience.

About the Authors

Thom Mayer, MD, is medical director for the NFL Players Association and an emergency physician recognized internationally for his work in patient experience, flow, and leading in crisis. He served as command physician at the Pentagon on 9/11.

Ori Litvak, MBA, is chief experience officer and senior vice president of healthcare operational excellence at LogixHealth, where he has spent more than 20 years redesigning patient-centered programs and improving operations across inpatient and outpatient care.