OhioHealth Appoints Chief Customer Experience Officer Lori Turner

What happened

OhioHealth, the Columbus-based not-for-profit health system, has appointed Lori Turner as its new Chief Customer Experience Officer. The announcement, made via the OhioHealth Newsroom, signals a formal elevation of patient and customer experience to C-suite level within one of Ohio's largest healthcare networks.

Turner steps into a role that carries organisation-wide responsibility for shaping how patients, families and communities interact with OhioHealth across its hospitals, outpatient facilities and digital touchpoints. The appointment reflects a broader trend in healthcare of treating experience not as a support function but as a strategic priority deserving dedicated executive leadership.

Why it matters

Healthcare is one of the highest-stakes arenas for customer experience design. Patients arrive in moments of vulnerability, anxiety and uncertainty — precisely the conditions under which behavioral economics tells us that process friction, unclear communication and perceived indifference cause disproportionate harm to trust. Naming a dedicated Chief Customer Experience Officer sends an unambiguous signal internally and externally: experience outcomes are being held to the same executive accountability as clinical and financial outcomes.

For service designers and CX practitioners watching the health sector, this move is instructive. It suggests that OhioHealth is treating the patient journey as an integrated product to be actively managed, rather than a byproduct of clinical delivery. As health systems compete on reputation, loyalty and community trust — particularly in markets where patients have genuine choice — a C-suite CX mandate can become a meaningful differentiator.

The Renascence take

The instinct to celebrate a CX appointment at the C-suite level is understandable, but the real test is never the title — it is the organisational wiring that sits beneath it.

Most health systems that create a Chief Experience Officer role quietly limit it to patient satisfaction scores and complaints handling — which is service recovery, not experience design. The behavioral principle that matters here is peak-end rule: patients judge an entire care episode by its most intense moment and its final impression, not its average. A CCXO with genuine authority should be redesigning discharge processes, billing communications and follow-up touchpoints — the "ends" that patients actually remember — not polishing survey metrics. OhioHealth's leadership should ensure Lori Turner has cross-functional mandate over those moments, or the appointment risks becoming a reputational gesture rather than a structural shift.