Leading Experience as a CXO Inside One of America’s Largest Health Systems
Applying hospitality principles to experience leadership in one of the country’s largest health systems
Healthcare is one of the largest and most complex industries in the world. At that scale, delivering a consistent, human-centered experience is especially challenging—and increasingly critical.
That’s the reality Sven Gierlinger navigates every day as SVP and Chief Experience Officer at Northwell Health—one of the largest healthcare systems in the United States and New York State’s largest private employer.
Before healthcare, Sven built his career in hospitality, including leadership roles at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company. Today, he brings that discipline—service excellence, culture, and human-centered design—into an industry where the margin for error is small and expectations are high.
In this episode of The Modern Customer Podcast, you hear how hospitality thinking, leadership rigor, and technology come together to shape healthcare experience at scale—and what it looks like in practice, not theory.
Key highlights from the conversation:
Building culture before technology so experience initiatives actually stick
Raising the bar on core moments—like food, comfort, and communication—where experience is felt most
Shifting from satisfaction scores to effort reduction to uncover real experience breakdowns
Using AI to triage demand so the right work reaches the right team
Designing employee experience intentionally, knowing it directly shapes patient experience on the front lines
You’ll learn how hospitality principles—attention to detail, pride in service, and human connection—translate into better healthcare outcomes. From reimagining hospital food as part of care to walking hospitals anonymously to uncover friction, this conversation shows how experience improves when leaders design from the human perspective.
🎧 Listen to the full episode to learn what modern healthcare CX leadership really looks like—when it’s done right.
Stream now on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or your favorite podcast platform.
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Incredible how the hospitality-to-healthcare translation actually works when you prioritze culture over tech implementation. The shift from satisfaction metrics to effort reduction is where most CX programs fail because they're still measuring what organizations want to track instead of what actualy matters to patients. Dealt with a health tech startup that kept adding features thinking it improved experience until we mapped the journey and realized every new feature created more cognitive load. Effort reduction as the North Star forces ruthless prioritization which most enterprise teams dunno how to do yet.