# Lara Klick

Lara Klick writes and speaks about healthcare leadership and operations, focusing on practical ways hospitals can improve patient and staff experiences—from fixing everyday operational problems to building trust and handling difficult conversations.

- Profile: https://b2binfluencer.marketing/creators/lara-klick/
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lara-klick
- Topics: leadership, healthcare
- Based on 14 dated posts, latest 2026-10-05

## Summary

Lara Klick is most useful for practical healthcare leadership and operations content on patient experience, trust, and frontline workflow.

- Best for: A patient-experience analytics platform or healthcare operations campaign needing a credible hospital quality voice.
- Not for: Consumer lifestyle, sleep, home goods, retail, or product cheerleading campaigns do not fit.
- Check first: Confirm sponsorship availability, fees, deliverables, timing, approval needs, and recent comparable post results.

### Takeaways

- A pillow costs ten to fifteen dollars, but searching wastes about sixteen dollars per nurse shift.
- Klick warns that pressuring staff to chase top HCAHPS scores can corrupt data.
- For tense talks, Klick suggests starting with the phrase We both want to find common ground.

## Main ideas

- **Patient-experience scores are a safety signal, not a popularity contest**: They argue that HCAHPS and top-box scoring are designed to isolate peak performance — whether the system reliably delivers, not whether it usually does — and that chasing top boxes corrupts the data and punishes staff. Pressuring or scripting people around survey answers violates CMS rules, they write, turning measurement into a compliance exercise instead of a way to find friction. Their reframe is outcome over number: chasing the score builds a punitive culture; chasing the safety outcome builds a curious one. They attribute a negative view of HCAHPS to a nurse they met, describing the nurse’s experience at a previous employer rather than presenting it as their own opinion.
- **Fix the “stupid stuff” before buying new technology**: They argue that small supply and workflow failures signal a strained system and quietly drain clinician time, and that hospitals spend more replacing that lost time than the missing supplies cost. They connect the gap between mission statements and daily floor reality to what they call a behavioral integrity gap. Their recommended fix is GROSS — Get Rid of Stupid Stuff — which they cover in two chapters of their book, supported by visual Kanban systems for basic supplies, frontline-set par levels, and treating infrastructure as a clinical priority. They argue that automating the future before fixing the basics leads to failed implementations.
- **Trust is who answers the phone**: They reduce trust to two plain instructions: answer the damned phone and call people back. Cultural initiatives, mandated service behaviors, and posters by the elevators matter far less than baseline reliability, they argue. Picking up the phone communicates respect before any solution is stated, while letting it ring into an abandoned queue tells people they are an interruption. They ask leaders whether they have callback-time standards and measure drop rates and pickup times.
- **Start hard conversations with “We both want...”**: In a recurring Tuesday TRUST³ Tip series, they teach three words — “We both want...” — as a way to move a high-stakes conflict from confrontation to collaboration. Their image is a rope team clipped to the same line on the same mountain face: pulling in opposite directions pulls the whole team off the ridge, so the team has to align on the direction of the climb. They place the tactic within a framework they call STATE, whose first move is starting with a common goal, and say they have used the words to anchor difficult conversations for nearly thirty years.
- **Lean into crisis, then lead through what follows**: They treat crisis as something healthcare leaders move toward rather than away from: worry about your own family while caring for others, prepare for the worst, then pivot from surviving the day to leading through what comes next. They apply the same discipline at a personal scale, arguing that operational friction can push anyone toward a victim mindset. Choosing a victor mindset means acknowledging the problem and controlling your response rather than pretending things do not suck.

## Work to read

- [Counting the real cost of a missing pillow](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/lara-klick_when-is-a-pillow-more-than-a-pillow-think-activity-7468277892578258945-2gCt)
- [Trust is who answers the phone](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/lara-klick_you-can-buy-all-the-books-on-synergy-and-activity-7508876859896635392-2na6)
- [Why treating patient experience data like a car dealership survey backfires](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/lara-klick_when-we-treat-experience-data-like-a-used-activity-7483904891082678273-0waf)
- [Twenty years inside Top-Box scoring](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/lara-klick_when-people-find-out-ive-entered-my-taylor-activity-7462131327295823872-Ehb4)
- ["We both want" as a de-escalation tool](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/lara-klick_we-both-want-three-simple-words-but-activity-7470101063505739776-sC5Q)
- [Leading a hospital through September 11, 2001](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/lara-klick_like-so-many-i-can-tell-you-where-i-was-activity-7504161845608394752-G5fm)

## Brand relationships

- **Sinai Hospital** (employment)
- **Simple Doesn't Mean Easy** (mention)

## Partnerships

Lara Klick’s posts include direct outreach about their book, a virtual book club, or an in-person masterclass, described in a post about applying high-reliability lessons. They do not document a sponsorship program. Ask directly about sponsorship availability, fees, deliverables, timing, and approval needs.

## Alternatives

- Charles J. French: Choose this alternative when the campaign audience is hospital IT, security, risk, or nursing leadership and the problem is the phone itself. The posts argue that unwanted and deceptive calls to hospital lines interrupt care and show up in experience scores. They name quietness of the hospital environment and responsiveness of hospital staff as the two HCAHPS measures affected, with 2% of Medicare payments at risk through Value-Based Purchasing and 25% of the VBP performance score tied to patient experience. One example reports a health system blocking 8,000 unwanted calls a day that were reaching nursing stations, the emergency department, and patient rooms, and notes AI-powered voice attacks that can fool experienced staff. For a patient-experience platform whose buyer cares about protecting the voice channel, this is the closer match: it connects the same experience metrics to an operational risk story that Lara Klick's posts do not cover.
- Brenda S.: Choose this alternative when the campaign needs a working health-system operator rather than a measurement specialist, especially around care at home and workforce wellbeing. One post marks a move into a director role with Kaiser Permanente Care at Home across Southern California and Hawaii and traces the path there through workforce wellbeing programs, cross-functional implementations, sales and benefits work, a consulting practice, publishing, and leading an employee resource group. It ends with the view that transformation sits at the intersection of people, experience, strategy, storytelling, and operations. The other post describes organizing a small dinner with six healthcare leaders, listing each person's specific work, and offering ten seats at a follow-up gathering in San Diego. That suits a platform seeking a peer convenor who can bring nursing and quality leaders into a room, or a campaign built around leaders carrying experience work inside a large delivery system.
- Oliver Feakins: Choose this alternative when the buyer is a travel nurse staffing agency or a healthcare workforce operator rather than a hospital quality department. The posts describe how the recruiter role changes when AI screens applications, summarizes candidate history, searches the database, and drafts follow-ups, leaving humans to handle the ten conversations technology flags as important and close them. The other cites Aya's Index showing open travel nurse jobs at 10,824 on September 28, up 16% in 30 days and 67% year over year. It warns that agencies which cut marketing budgets and recruiter teams during the downturn may now face a capacity gap, using the framing that marketing is the gas, recruiting is the engine, and technology is the transmission. If the platform sells into recruitment marketing, candidate engagement, or staffing operations, this is the same audience and the same decisions.

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AI-assisted summary of public posts. Audience demographics are not available. Engagement appears only where we checked recent posts. Method: https://b2binfluencer.marketing/methodology/