Hillery Smith Shay on Total Experience and Digital Transformation at Children's Minnesota

Summary

Podcast Summary: Hillery Smith Shay on Total Experience and Digital Transformation at Children's Minnesota

Becker’s Healthcare Podcast – February 24, 2026
Guest: Hillery Smith Shay, Chief Marketing and Experience Officer & SVP of Communications, Children’s Minnesota
Host: Chris Sosa

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Episode Overview

This episode centers on how Children’s Minnesota is advancing patient experience and digital transformation under the leadership of Hillery Smith Shay. Topics include the creation and operationalization of the "Total Experience" strategy, the implementation of a new EHR system (EPIC), the integration of digital and cultural improvements, challenges facing pediatric healthcare, and long-term visions for organizational growth.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Introduction to Role & Organization

• [00:24] Hillery introduces herself and Children’s Minnesota as "one of the largest independent pediatric health systems in the United States," serving an exclusively pediatric population from “routine care to the most medically complex conditions."
  • Quote: “Our work is grounded in a simple belief, and that is, kids deserve care designed specifically for them.” (B, 00:38)

2. 2025’s Most Important Initiative: The Total Experience Strategy

• [01:15] Hillery highlights building an “enterprise perspective” experience strategy, termed "Total Experience":
  • Domains include digital, human, clinical, environmental, and brand promise.
  • The goal is to ensure families truly feel what the organization promises.
  • Importance of embedding experience into the culture, not just as external messaging.
  • Prior lack of leader standard work and continuous improvement prompted the new strategy.
  • Directly connects her recent promotion to formalizing and operationalizing this roadmap.
  • Quote: "We need to be able to function as if creating a good experience is what we are actually here for." (B, 03:13)

3. Manifesting Experience Improvements in Daily Operations

• [02:30] Structural changes include blending "continuous improvement and equity and inclusion work" into the culture.
  • Expansion of leader development and direct communication of positive stories and best practices.
  • Focus on making the hospital a place "where [kids] still felt like [they were] growing and thriving.”
  • Quote: "Wouldn't you want it to be someplace where you still felt like your child was growing and thriving?" (B, 03:34)

4. Strategic Priorities & Headwinds for 2026

• [05:35] Hillery discusses the current three-year plan as part of a ten-year strategic aspiration.
  • Main focus: Implementation of EPIC, a leading electronic health record (EHR) system, with launch slated for October.
  • Implementation team is termed "Eclipse" to foster excitement and a future-focused mindset.
  • EPIC chosen for its alignment with both family and clinical workflow, regional collaboration (MyChart synchronicity), and enhanced measurement capabilities.
  • Simultaneously building organizational capability with the Experience Council, a two-year learning cohort made up of experts across all five experience domains.

5. Rationale for EPIC EHR Implementation

• [09:24] Decision based on:
  • Peer benchmarking for innovation.
  • Direct physician and care provider feedback requesting ease of collaboration.
  • National evidence supporting EPIC’s positive impact on patient and family experience.
  • Provides infrastructure for measuring and improving experience outcomes.
  • Quote: "If you don’t build something on a good foundation, it will fall apart. We've all seen that." (B, 10:14)

6. Core Challenges Ahead: Predictability and Environment

• [11:13] Biggest challenge: Unpredictability in healthcare, notably regarding reimbursement and Medicaid funding risks ("we are a Medicaid service provider who... only receive $0.70 on the dollar").
  • Adapting to financial constraints while investing in experience and excellence.
  • Community health trends: Rising acuity among ED (emergency department) patients, likely due to delayed care seeking, resulting in more complex cases.
  • Quote: "The people who were coming to us were much sicker—the children were much sicker and needing more care." (B, 13:19)

7. Long-term Growth & Investment Opportunities

• [14:29] Three focus areas for future growth:
  1. Digital Integration: Successful execution of EPIC and a “digital front door” strategy will "dramatically reduce friction for families and clinicians."
  2. Thought Leadership: Children’s Minnesota can provide a national voice on policy and patient safety.
  3. Experience as Strategic Differentiator: Operationalizing experience at scale, with governance, discipline, and accountability, establishes a competitive edge.
  • Quote: "Pediatric healthcare needs organizations willing to lead with both competence and courage." (B, 15:24)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “Kids deserve care designed specifically for them. And that's why we call it we're the Kid Experts.” (B, 00:39)
• "We need to be able to function as if creating a good experience is what we are actually here for." (B, 03:13)
• "Experience becomes a competitive moat, not a marketing slogan." (B, 15:13)
• "To differentiate on experience, that only happens when what we promise and what we say and what people live are intentionally aligned." (B, 15:23)

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Important Timestamps

• 00:24: Introduction to Hillery Smith Shay and Children’s Minnesota
• 01:15: Explanation of the Total Experience strategy
• 03:13: Cultural embedding of experience and continuous improvement
• 05:35: 2026 priorities—EPIC EHR implementation and Experience Council
• 09:24: Choosing EPIC and impact on patient/provider experience
• 11:13: Healthcare unpredictability and Medicaid funding discussion
• 13:19: Impact of ED volume drop and higher acuity patients
• 14:29: Opportunities for growth: digital, thought leadership, experience as differentiator

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Tone and Language

Hillery’s tone is passionate, strategic, and grounded in both operational realities and aspirational goals. She emphasizes evidence-based decision-making, organizational culture change, and the imperative to operationalize what others merely promise.

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Summary Conclusion

Hillery Smith Shay’s episode offers a rich, practical look at how a major pediatric health system is tackling the linked challenges of experience, technology, and sustainability. Through systematic culture change, strategic investments in digital tools like EPIC, and continuous operational improvement, Children’s Minnesota aims to become the region’s “easy button” for pediatric care—delivering on its promise to be truly “the Kid Experts.”

Transcript

[A]

Welcome to the Beckers Healthcare Podcast. I'm Chris Sosa, your host, and I'm very happy today to be joined by Hilary Smith Shea. She's Chief Marketing and Experience Officer and Senior Vice President of Communications for Children's Minnesota. Hillary, thank you for joining us today.

[B]

Thank you so much for having me. Yeah.

[A]

So glad you could make time. Before we get rolling into the meat of the podcast, Hillary, could you just please introduce yourself and tell us a bit about your organization?

[B]

Sure. You did a great job, but I am Hilary Smith Shea. I am the Senior Vice President of Communications and the Chief Marketing and Experience Officer here at Children's Minnesota, one of the largest independent pediatric health systems in the United States. We care exclusively for children, from routine care to the most medically complex conditions. Our work is grounded in a simple belief, and that is, kids deserve care designed specifically for them. And that's why we call it we're the Kid Experts.

[A]

Perfect, Hilary. So we're a little bit into 2026, and I do want to look ahead at what Children's Minnesota has coming a little bit later, but for now, I do want to look back at 2025 a little bit. And specifically, what would you say is the most important initiative that you led in the last year? Just take us a bit through it and how it evolved and what the results were.

[B]

So, you know, the most important initiative I led was. Was really developing our experience strategy from an enterprise perspective. And so I will let you know that we're calling it Total Experience, but it really did look at the actual domains that we can control of someone's experience here within the hospital. And so that includes the digital domain, the human domain, the clinical domain, the environmental domain, and then delivering on our brand promise, which really experience is, you know, we are firm believers, or at least I should say I'm a firm believer in that my role and the creation of my role really supports the strategy of making sure people feel what we promise.

[A]

That's certainly a worthwhile goal, and I'm sure it manifests itself in any number of ways. So let me ask you this, then. So when you walk into Children's Minnesota, which is pretty much every day, how does that manifest itself in just making your way through the halls of your. Your organization?

[B]

So a couple things, and I guess this is why this is the initiative that I started. It wasn't. I wasn't feeling everything that we could do. We do amazing work, but we weren't really talking about it, and we weren't really making sure that we were following through on it. And part of that is because we didn't really have leader standard work, and we weren't really using continuous improvement. And we put together a strong strategic plan that actually blends continuous improvement and equity and inclusion work and embeds it into who we are as a culture. And so I realized, you know what? We're not going to be able to differentiate on experience if we don't embed that into the culture. And so we need to be able to function as if creating a good experience is what we are actually here for. Because at the end of the day, these children are coming to us, and they're still kids. You know, their. Their lives are literally not stopping, but all of a sudden, they have to actually spend time in a place where it. We can make our own bit of mag magic here. And I think that sometimes people think, well, isn't that, you know, aspirational? And no kid wants to go to the hospital. And they said, but what if you're a kid who has a chronic condition and you have to continuously come back and forth to the hospital? Wouldn't you want it to be someplace where you still felt like your child was growing and thriving? Wouldn't you want to be excited to go where you are? And so being here for those who need us and creating an experience that allows them to continue to be children and to continue thriving should be everybody's aspiration. And so putting parameters around that and building that strategy and then helping to operationalize it over time is. Is exactly why I was promoted into this position. Because before I was the VP of Marketing Communications, I worked on an experience strategy, was able to develop it, and develop a core roadmap for how we build that capability in the organization. And fortunately, at the end of doing that for my organization, they asked me if I would lead it. And so I am grateful.

[A]

Well, belated congratulations on your promotion, Hillary. Certainly it's well deserved. And you make a great point about wanting to create an experience that people want to come back to, even though no kid, no patient really wants to go back to the hospital. You can look at any organization, say, you know what? I remember I like my experience. So that's where I'm going to continue to go. And I'm sure it's no different with Children's Minnesota or any other healthcare provider organization. So thank you again for that, Hilary. I love looking back at what organizations have accomplished over the past year. Next, let's look ahead to 2026, as we teased earlier. So what would you say are the biggest Priorities and headwinds you're focused on for 20, 26 and any tailwinds you might have pushing you ahead.

[B]

Absolutely. That's such a great question. So we have the momentum of thinking through our strategy. We created a ten year strategic. An aspiration, a ten year aspiration. And we are moving the strategic plan forward in that. So this is year two of the first three year strategic plan in service of our ten year future state. And so what we're doing is implementing a new ehr. We are moving to EPIC because we understand that that is where we need to be to be what our customers need and to be easier to work with. When you look at the people who would be referring to us, when you look at the patients who would be coming to us and the ability to affect those experiences and make working with us extremely, much easier, we knew that that was the foundation we needed to build. And so as we implement epic, our implementation team is called Eclipse. And that is a fun way of getting to make spaceships and starships and talking about the future and all the places we'll go with the right technology. And so EPIC is going in and we should launch in October. And so that's really kind of our main focus. But we have some other experience things following along. You know, I'm not the IT person, but I definitely want to make sure people understand that having the right EH HR system is core to our belief of being able to be every family's essential partner in raising healthy children. There's no way to say, hey, we can make it seamless when you're in my chart for yourself and your care with our partners, our adult partners in the region. And you can't then manage your kids care in EPIC and in my chart. And so that is an experience. It's just how do we simplify and make sure people's lives are going to align? And so I love that we're doing this transformation, but we also work on, we're working on the building that culture of experience alongside that. So we've established the Experience Council, which I love because we've basically taken our experts who align with all of the five domains I told you about. So our clinical experts, our human experts, our digital experts and our environmental experts, and even our brand experts. And we literally brought together members of those team into what I like to call a cohort. And it is a 24 month cohort of learning and becoming experience experts, but also taking the time to learn what it means to be an expert in environmental experience or human experience or clinical experience and what all of those things mean. So really building a core group that understands and that spending time in each of those domains over the next 24 months and or should I say we're halfway through. So they've only got 12 more. But to really understand and help the ambassadors and ultimately the system governance for what it means to have the kid expert experience.

[A]

Thank you, Hilary. I do want to follow up on this when you speak about the EHR experience and I don't want you to do necessarily PR for EPIC here, but I am curious how you and the organization came to the conclusions like, okay, and you mentioned the synchronicity aspect with other adult partners. So but how did you know? It's like, okay, this is the one we need to go with and this is what's going to make our customer experience better.

[B]

Really. We looked at who's innovating, we looked at who's innovating in this space, but we also looked at what our customers need because at the end of the day we are the only stop for tertiary quaternary care that's continuous here in the, in the Twin Cities, but also in the regional area we have over 60 specialties. We really are a comprehensive pediatric health system and so we serve many, many audiences. And one of our audiences was consistently telling us I really wish you were easier to work with. And those are our physician partners and our care providers. And so we took a strong look at that and then we looked at all of the evidence based data that shows that EPIC has improved the experience of patients and families across the organization. And so the fact that we would now be able to not only define our experience domains but then actually be able to improve upon them, create our own data and then be able to analyze and measure how we're doing really forced us to take this, this total experience approach. And so I'm excited because a, I get to lead it, but, but EPIC is clearly the right tool and it's the right foundation because if you don't build something on a good foundation, it will fall apart. We've all seen that.

[A]

You are absolutely right. As you look ahead, Hillary, at not only the EPIC implementation but any other project that you have coming up here in the next year, what do you think is the hardest thing you'll have to do? And I don't mean to ask that to say it's something you're not looking forward to. You could very much be looking forward to it and excited about it, but it might just require an extra ounce of focus. Right. So what would you say is the hardest thing you have to do?

[B]

I think the hardest thing is predictability in our organization right now. Health care is in a very transitional period. There are lots of factors playing into the state of how health care is being administrated, how health care is being paid for. A lot of people don't actually understand how much Medicaid affects children and that we are a Medicaid service provider who, who really still only receive $0.70 on the dollar for everything that we provide. And right now that $0.70 per dollar is already being threatened with cuts, et cetera. And so it really makes us have to think about how do we continue to provide excellent care differently. And then if we want to differentiate on experience, what are the investments that we need to make so that we can actually make working with Children's Minnesota the easy button, if that makes sense. And so I say that we look at what's going to happen with health care, what's happening with reimbursement, how we'll be able to invest in our organization, because we are really here for the kids and we want to be what the kids need. And so I think the most difficult thing is not knowing what's around the corner that's also going to affect health care. And I would be remiss to not say that we notice changes in our community and how they affect even the way we provide care. And so as we have dealt with this metro surge here in Minnesota, we have noticed that we had a significant drop in our ED visits, but we had a significant increase in our percentage of admins, which meant and indicated that people were not seeking the care when they needed it, but when it was absolutely emergent. And that created a higher likelihood of those patients visiting the ED and then going home to those patients finally getting to the ED and then needing to be admitted. So we do monitor our percentage of admits based on our ED volume. And so while the volume was going down, the people who were coming to us were much sicker, the children were much sicker and needing more care. And so we don't like that. We don't like anything that affects the health of children that gets in their way of thriving and getting them the care that they need. Because what could have been simple turned into far more complex and dangerous. And nobody wants to see that when it comes to children.

[A]

No, not at all. And here's hoping that Children's Minnesota and everywhere else is at the worst of that. And it's only going to improve from here. And I'm sure Your organization will do the best it can to make that happen. Lastly, Hillary, my question for you is looking even further ahead here, and this timeline can be a year, 18 months, two years, whatever you see as appropriate. But where do you see the best opportunities for organizational growth investment? However, you want to quantify that as far as Children Minnesota is concerned.

[B]

So I'm glad you asked that because three areas stand out for me. First, I think that our digital integration, if we execute EPIC and our digital front door strategy well, we can dramatically reduce friction for families and clinicians. Second, thought, leadership. There's a national hunger for credible pediatric voices. We have the expertise to shape conversations about child health policy, safety and ways that are principled in evidence. And then third, experience as a strategic differentiator. Many organizations talk about experience, few operationalize it at scale. If we continue building the governance, measurement, discipline and leadership accountability, experience becomes a competitive moat, not a marketing slogan. And that's important to me because a lot of people might wonder, why would you put experience in marketing? And I would say, why wouldn't. Thank you. Because to differentiate on experience, that only happens when what we promise and what we say and what people live are intentionally aligned. You can't. It doesn't happen by accident. So frankly, Pediatric healthcare needs organizations willing to lead with both competence and courage.

[A]

Right now, I think that's a perfect place to end. Hillary, thank you so much for dropping by and giving us all your insight as far as how Children Minnesota is handling challenging situations and really looking forward to how it improves in the years to come. And we'll see you very shortly here in Chicago. Can't wait for that too.

[B]

Yes, I'm looking forward to it. I'm hoping it'll be springtime by then. We still have snow on the ground.

[A]

We all hope the same for sure. And regardless, we look forward to the next time our paths cross. Hillary, whenever that may be.

[B]

Oh, love, lovely. Good to talk to you. Thank you.