Breaking the Benchmark Reflex in Healthcare

Here’s why health systems should shift their focus from static national percentile rankings to hyper-contextual measurement aligned with meaningful progress, trust, and outcomes specific to their own patients and communities.

Many of us have seen the trap of comparison — especially parents. You can look at a growth chart and feel proud of progress… and then watch that pride evaporate when percentile curves are compared against another child. One number can suddenly override context, nuance, and what is actually true.

Healthcare has been conditioned into a similar mindset. For years, traditional benchmarking approaches tied success to national percentile rankings — peer comparisons that shift constantly with who is in the dataset. Percentiles became the shorthand for “How good are we?” even when they tell us very little about whether patients are truly doing better.

We understand how we got here. Comparison feels objective. It creates the illusion of certainty. But percentile rankings can distract from what matters most: meaningful improvement for the patients, clinicians, and communities we serve. Not whether we are outscoring someone else, but whether patients are actually doing better. Whether they trust us. Whether they feel seen, heard, safe, and supported in their care.

This is not an indictment of leaders. It’s an invitation to reframe success around the progress our own patients can feel — and to align measurement with that purpose.

Why Percentile Rankings Flatten What Makes You Unique

Every health system is different: patient mix, community needs, payer footprint, social context, historical baseline, digital ecosystem, and staffing realities. Within a single system, NICU priorities differ from Orthopedics, Behavioral Health, or Ambulatory Surgery. Trust signals surface differently in rural clinics than in urban EDs. Percentile rankings erase this nuance. They flatten uniqueness into averages.

Three unintended consequences follow:

• Progress gets masked. You can materially improve communication or discharge clarity and see little movement in a percentile rank influenced by shifts in the peer set.
  
• Energy gets misdirected. Chasing the 90th percentile rewards conformity, not context-specific innovation.
  
• Action gets delayed. Benchmarks arrive long after the moment to intervene has passed.
  

And this matters even more now because the future state of healthcare is increasingly consumer-driven. Patients are no longer comparing their care experience only to other hospitals;  they’re comparing it to the digital ease, transparency, speed, and personalization they receive in retail, hospitality, banking, and e-commerce. Benchmarking only against healthcare risks optimizing for yesterday when the expectations curve is being set everywhere else.

Benchmarks can provide context, but they do not guide improvement. If the goal is to strengthen trust, reduce friction, and elevate outcomes, we need measures that reflect your patients, your context, and your trajectory.

Redefining Success: Progress You Can Feel

Success should be defined by progress over time, within your population and service lines, and tied to outcomes that matter clinically, operationally, and reputationally.

Ask sharper questions:

• Are communication breakdowns decreasing during handoffs?
  
• Are more patients leaving with clear, confident recovery plans?
  
• Are staff barriers being removed so clinicians can focus on care?
  
• Are historically marginalized populations reporting higher trust and access?
  
• Are digital and call center experiences reducing friction, confusion, and avoidable utilization?
  

When measures align to goals like these, leaders and frontline teams can see their impact — and sustain it.

The Medallia Difference (Without the Drama)

We’re not here to make traditional benchmarking the villain. We’re here to help the industry evolve beyond it.

Medallia’s approach centers on hyper-contextual improvement: measuring and improving what matters for your population, your service lines, and your frontline realities. From there, we support the mindset and operating model shift required to sustain change. And finally, we accelerate it with real-time multi-signal listening and AI so you can act before issues calcify.

In practice, that means:

• Your patients, your context, your progress. Listening and measurement structured around your goals — not generic national peer sets.
  
• Culture change, not just metric change. Medallia Advisory partners with leadership to reframe performance from “Where do we rank?” to “What outcomes matter most for our patients and community?”
  
• Speed to clarity. Our platform brings together patient voice, operational data, staff voice, digital feedback, call center transcripts, and unstructured signals — and our AI capabilities surface themes, predict risk, and spotlight next best actions in near real time.
  

And because we look across patient, member, and employee experience signals together, leaders can see patterns that only emerge when signals intersect. Often, the root cause of patient friction shows up first inside employee feedback, and vice versa. Unstructured feedback becomes the connective tissue that reveals both sides of the experience… and accelerates a more precise response.

What “Hyper-Context” Looks Like in Practice

Hyper-context isn’t just a concept. It’s a set of intentional choices leaders make:

• Population-specific trust. If building trust with Veterans experiencing co-occurring mental health and chronic pain is critical, success is tracked in that specific population’s voice — access, respect, clarity, follow-through — versus diluted national aggregates.
  
• Service-line specificity. If Surgical Services struggle with pre-op communication and day-of-surgery delays, goals and signals narrow to those moments of truth so improvement is surgical, not generic.
  
• Channel-aware action. If digital scheduling friction increases call volume and missed care, digital telemetry and contact center signals are analyzed together to target the top fixes that reduce downstream burden.
  
• Community alignment. If language access or transportation are trust barriers, measures reflect those realities — and progress is defined by real reduction in friction, not just higher top-box scores.
  

This is how measurement becomes a lever, not a lagging scoreboard.

Advisory Support: Making the Mindset Shift Stick

Changing the metric is the easier part. Changing how people use metrics is where transformation actually happens.

Medallia Advisory helps leadership teams install the habits of goal-driven improvement:

1. Reframe the narrative — from rank to purpose.
   
2. Set actionable goals tied to trust, harm reduction, throughput, U.S. News aims, Stars/HEDIS targets, and market growth.
   
3. Align incentives & routines so insights flow to the people best positioned to act.
   
4. Make progress visible so momentum compounds instead of stalls.
   

When leaders measure what matters — and make progress visible — culture shifts from comparison to continuous learning.

Real-Time Signals and AI: Turning Insight Into Action

Once you’re aligned on what to improve, speed becomes the differentiator. This is where Medallia’s real-time, multi-signal platform and AI capabilities help you move faster:

• Surface what matters sooner. Analyze patient comments, staff feedback, call transcripts, and digital behaviors to find root causes surveys alone miss.
  
• Predict and prevent. Identify patterns that signal quality risk, uneven access, low trust, or compliance exposure — and intervene early.
  
• Personalize next steps. Recommend targeted actions and playbooks that fit each unit’s context, instead of broad directives to “raise the score.”
  

This isn’t more data. It’s the right signals — together — at the right moment.

Proof in Practice: The VA

This evolution is already happening.

The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs — serving one of the most diverse and mission-critical patient populations — has been advancing listening and improvement models anchored in context, trust, and population-specific insight. By bringing multiple signals together and focusing on outcomes Veterans can feel — clarity, respect, access, and follow-through — leaders are closing gaps faster and strengthening confidence in care.

It shows what becomes possible when we move beyond static rankings toward purpose-driven progress.

A Practical Roadmap for the Next 12–24 Months

Like any long-term human development experience (parenting included), progress compounds over time. Here’s a pragmatic arc that works:

• Months 1–3: Awareness
  Recognize the limitations of percentile rankings and identify the outcomes that matter most.
  
• Months 4–6: Alignment
  Define goals with sponsorship, link signals to outcomes, assign owners.
  
• Months 7–12: Activation
  Act on real-time signals, close loops faster, make improvement visible.
  
• Year 2+: Acceleration
  Expand hyper-context into more service lines and populations, treat improvement as a habit, not a project.
  

What You’ll Gain by Shifting the Framework

When organizations anchor improvement to context-aware, actionable goals, results show up everywhere:

• Reputation & growth through clearer communication and safer transitions
  
• Patient safety by lowering preventable harm
  
• Operational excellence by resolving friction in access, billing, digital, and scheduling
  
• Workforce resilience as teams see their work producing visible impact
  

Benchmarks show where you stand today. Actionable goals chart where you’re going — and how you’re going to get there.

Bringing It All Together

Imagine success measured not by a percentile rank in a quarterly report, but by the confidence patients feel when they leave your care. Imagine frontline teams who can see, in real time, how their actions reduce friction and build trust. Imagine communities who recognize your system as a place where communication is clear, access is equitable, and care is coordinated.

That’s the future we’re building with our partners across healthcare.

• Reframe success around purpose, not percentiles
  
• Listen more broadly, across patient, employee, digital, and operational signals
  
• Align goals to what actually matters for your population
  
• Measure progress visibly so momentum sustains
  
• Accelerate with real-time insight and AI so you act before issues calcify
  

Healthcare doesn’t need to win the comparison game. It needs to pursue its highest potential, and measure success by the progress that truly matters.Those who have seen this pattern in parenting recognize the truth: growth is healthiest when it’s personal, contextual, and supported. The same is true in healthcare. Let’s move past the reflex of percentile rankings and toward a future defined by trust, outcomes, and experiences people can feel every single day.