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.
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.
Key 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.
Check first: Confirm sponsorship availability, fees, deliverables, timing, approval needs, and recent comparable post results.
Main ideas
Patient-experience scores are a safety signal, not a popularity contest · Fix the “stupid stuff” before buying new technology · Trust is who answers the phone
Lara Klick writes about healthcare leadership and operations, focusing on the everyday conditions that shape patient and staff experiences.
Their posts connect practical details—like finding a pillow or returning a phone call—to larger questions of trust, safety, and whether hospital systems deliver on their promises.
They also write about patient-experience measurement and difficult conversations, and name the book Simple Doesn’t Mean Easy.
Readers looking for concrete, example-led perspectives on improving healthcare operations will find their work especially relevant.
Klick makes leadership ideas tangible by starting with familiar moments and tracing their operational consequences.
In “When is a pillow more than a pillow?”, they contrast the cost of a pillow with nursing time spent searching for one, arguing that fixing basic workflow problems can matter more than adding another layer of technology.
In a post on HCAHPS and experience data, they warn that pressuring staff to chase top scores can make survey results less useful and distract from safety and care outcomes.
They turn that principle into practical prompts, such as asking frontline staff what gets in the way of care and checking whether patients’ calls are answered reliably.
For tense conversations, they offer the simple phrase “We both want…” to help people establish common ground.
Their work also includes personal storytelling: an account of the hospital’s response on September 11, 2001, and a lighter reflection on staying focused on what one can control when everyday plans go wrong.
Their writing centers on a handful of recurring arguments: patient-experience scores are a safety and reliability signal rather than a popularity contest; hospitals should clear small everyday operational failures before investing in new technology; trust is built through unglamorous basics like answering the phone and doing what you said; a few deliberate words can shift hard conversations; and leaders should lean into crisis and manage their own response when things go wrong.
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They argue from hospital-floor and command-center experience, use cost math and service anecdotes to make the case, and repeatedly turn each point into a question for readers.
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.
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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.
Klick recounts sitting in a CMS headquarters room in Baltimore in February 2006 for the introductory HCAHPS training and still keeping the binder, and asks whether "usually" is acceptable when it is your own parent in the hospital bed.
In the second post, Klick's 86-year-old father's nurse says she hates HCAHPS after a prior health system pressured staff to "push for Always," hired nurses to carry that message on leadership rounds, and gave prizes to departments with perfect employee-survey scores.
Klick compares that to a used-car salesman asking for top boxes to protect his bonus, and notes the nurse still gave excellent discharge instructions — the kind of care that keeps an 86-year-old from returning to the emergency department.
They call themself a data geek while arguing that the number should not be the point, and keep a quote about putting people over numbers at the forefront of their work.
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.
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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.
In a post about pillows, they cite a hospital bedding study in which nearly 30% of occupied beds lacked proper linens and only 9.6% of patients reported feeling very comfortable.
They price the workaround: a pillow costs $10–15, an RN’s fully loaded cost is roughly $1.09 per minute, so 15 minutes a shift spent hunting for pillows wastes about $16.35 in nursing labor per nurse per shift.
They contrast “top of license” promises with nurses acting as supply-chain managers and dietary clerks, then ask readers what the biggest piece of stupid stuff is on their unit.
They reduce trust to two plain instructions: answer the damned phone and call people back.
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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.
They describe tracking down an insurance agent whose line rang twice.
A live person listened and promised three options by 3:00 PM, delivered them at 2:45, and called back within twenty minutes on a follow-up.
They contrast that with a search for a house painter: two of four contractors ghosted them, one resurfaced nearly a month later asking if they still needed a bid, and the fourth called back before lunch, arrived on time, and walked the perimeter with a notebook — and got the job.
On the healthcare side, they describe a family stuck on hold trying to confirm that post-op discharge instructions reached their pharmacy, and a charge nurse waiting seventy-two hours for a telemetry monitor repair.
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.
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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.
Klick's example phrasing is "We both want to make sure this care loop is safe for our clinicians," which they say stops the tug-of-war and turns people from competitors facing each other into partners looking up the trail together.
The post points readers to a short video walkthrough and asks them when the phrase would have worked for them.
Klick notes with self-deprecating humor that it does not work on teenage girls.
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.
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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.
In a September 11, 2001 remembrance, they describe sitting in a security meeting at Sinai Hospital in Baltimore at 9:00 AM.
The room went still at 9:03 when both directors’ phones rang.
By 9:59, they had built a communications plan while watching the South Tower collapse, started an emergency on-site daycare within half an hour for staff whose schools had closed, coordinated with the local Red Cross as community members arrived to donate blood, and stood up mass casualty protocols for a surge that never came.
In a lighter post, a lightning strike in July in Florida knocks out their air conditioning, leaving them waiting for a part amid a supply-chain delay.
They describe slipping toward a victim mindset, then applying the self-regulation and “They” to “I” ideas they teach, buying a $40 fan and keeping their sense of humor.
The two posts show the same priority at different scales — a hospital command center on September 11 and a home air conditioner in a Florida summer — making the self-regulation argument consistent rather than situational.
Answers a newcomer’s likely question: what does an operations-focused healthcare leader actually change on a hospital floor?
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This post uses one small supply problem and a cost calculation.
Lara Klick opens with a scene: a patient arrives vulnerable, and there is no pillow.
They cite a hospital bedding study in which nearly 30% of occupied beds lacked proper linens and only 9.6% of patients reported feeling very comfortable.
Then they price the workaround: a pillow costs $10–15, an RN's fully loaded cost is about $1.09 per minute, so 15 minutes a shift hunting for pillows burns roughly $16.35 in clinician time per nurse per shift.
Their argument is that hospitals spend more in wasted nursing labor than the supplies cost, and that this gap between stated values and daily reality—what they call a behavioral integrity gap—wears down culture.
The fix they name is GROSS, "Get Rid of Stupid Stuff," which they say they cover in two chapters of their book, plus visual Kanban systems for basic supplies and treating infrastructure as a clinical priority.
The post ends with a question to readers about the biggest "stupid stuff" on their unit.
For brands planning a campaign
A campaign built on operational waste or supply-chain friction can anchor on this post: it supplies a concrete dollar figure, a named framework and a frontline voice. Vendors selling supply automation, Kanban systems or clinical workflow tools have a ready-made problem statement to respond to.
Shows how Klick talks about trust in plain terms, without the vocabulary of culture programs or executive presence.
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Klick reduces trust to seven words: "Answer the damned phone.
Call people back."
They tell two consumer stories to prove it.
Shopping for insurance, they reach an agent whose line rings twice; a live person answers and promises options by 3:00 PM, then delivers at 2:45 and calls back within twenty minutes on a follow-up.
Getting a house painted, they contact four contractors: two never respond, one resurfaces a month later, and the fourth calls back before lunch, arrives on time and walks the perimeter with a notebook.
That contractor gets the job.
They contrast this with healthcare's preference for committee meetings, mandated service behaviors and posters by the elevators, while a family waits on hold for post-op discharge instructions and a charge nurse waits seventy-two hours for a telemetry monitor repair.
They close by asking readers who answers their phone, whether callback timeframes are defined, and whether drop rates and pickup times are measured.
For brands planning a campaign
Directly useful for patient access, call center and contact-center technology campaigns: the post names the metrics a buyer would measure and frames responsiveness as a trust issue rather than a service-line nicety.
Shows what Klick thinks measurement is for, the clearest signal of how they would approach an experience-improvement engagement.
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The post begins with a personal scene: Klick is at a surgery center across the state with their 86-year-old father for a cardiac catheterization.
His nurse, learning that they work on patient experience with hospitals, says plainly that she hates HCAHPS.
At a previous health system, they write, leadership pressured staff to "push for Always," hired nurses to make rounds for local leaders carrying that message, and offered prizes to departments with perfect employee-survey scores.
They compare that to a used-car salesman asking for top boxes so he keeps his bonus, and note two consequences: the survey data becomes worthless as a signal, and coaching or scripting patients around survey questions violates CMS standards.
Their point is that HCAHPS is a safety and high-reliability metric, not a popularity contest, and that chasing the score builds a punitive culture while chasing the outcome builds a curious one.
They end by asking how frontline leaders can shift the conversation from hitting the number to securing the safety outcome.
For brands planning a campaign
The strongest example for any campaign touching survey methodology, patient experience vendors or leadership coaching: the post names the failure mode (score-chasing), the compliance boundary (CMS rules) and the reframe (outcome over score).
Shows where Klick's authority on patient experience measurement comes from, in their own account, and what they say that length of experience taught them.
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Klick writes that in February 2006 they sat in a CMS headquarters room in Baltimore for the introductory training for administrators of the HCAHPS survey, and that they still keep the binder from that day.
They say they have since spent two decades on federal calls, in boardrooms and on hospital floors working through the psychometric testing, statistics and human behavior behind the scores.
Their technical point: CMS designed Top-Box scoring to isolate peak performance on purpose, because a combined metric hides the gaps where safety and dignity break down.
They illustrate it with a direct question—would you accept that a nurse "usually" answers the call light before your parent soils themselves?
The post announces a newsletter retrospective and asks readers how they have equated top-box with high reliability for frontline teams.
It closes with their book "Simple Doesn't Mean Easy," available on Amazon, and an offer to arrange bulk orders, virtual book clubs or in-person masterclasses.
For brands planning a campaign
Useful when a campaign needs the measurement rationale rather than the anecdote: here Klick explains Top-Box design and why they treat it as a reliability signal. The book-club and bulk-order offer also shows the commercial formats they present publicly.
Shows what Klick actually teaches, as opposed to what they observe: a repeatable tactic a reader could use in a meeting tomorrow.
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Part of a recurring series Klick labels Tuesday TRUST³ Tips, the post takes three words—"We both want..."—and argues they move a high-stakes healthcare conflict from confrontation to collaboration.
Their metaphor is a rope team clipped to the same line on the same mountain face: pulling in opposite directions takes the whole team off the ridge.
The tactic sits inside what they call their STATE framework, where the first move is starting with a common goal; the example phrasing is "We both want to make sure this care loop is safe for our clinicians."
They say they have used the words to anchor hard conversations for nearly thirty years, point readers to a video walkthrough and invite them to describe a situation where the phrase would have worked.
A self-deprecating aside concedes it does not work on teenage girls.
For brands planning a campaign
Suits communication-training, conflict-resolution or leadership-development campaigns: it delivers a named framework, a scripted phrase and a video asset in a format designed for weekly reuse.
Shows Klick's firsthand crisis experience: this is the post where they describe being in the room.
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Klick reconstructs the morning by timestamp.
At 9:00 AM they were in a meeting with the director and assistant director of security at Sinai Hospital in Baltimore, reviewing a rise in behavioral incidents.
At 9:03 both men's phones rang at once, and the room went still.
By 9:59 they were in the public relations director's office building a communications plan, watching a small television when the South Tower collapsed.
The rest of the day was hospital command center work: schools closing and staff scrambling for childcare, an on-site emergency daycare running within half an hour, coordinating with the local Red Cross as community members arrived to donate blood, and standing up mass casualty protocols for a surge that never came.
They note that their Baltimore experience was a fraction of what colleagues in New York and Virginia faced.
The post closes on the shift from surviving the day to leading through what followed.
For brands planning a campaign
Rare firsthand material for campaigns about crisis leadership, emergency preparedness or hospital operations under pressure. It also shows Klick will write at length from personal experience when the subject warrants it.
Frontline operational friction and “stupid stuff”1
Behavioral integrity and baseline reliability1
Trust-based conflict de-escalation1
Crisis leadership and command-center operations1
Self-regulation under operational stress1
Patient experience and survey culture
Lara Klick treats patient-experience measurement as a safety and high-reliability issue, not a popularity contest.
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In one post, they connect two decades since HCAHPS introductory training to the argument that top-box scoring is meant to isolate peak performance; “usually” is not good enough when it is a parent or spouse in the bed.
In another, they recount a nurse who hates HCAHPS because a prior employer pressured staff to push for “Always” and gave prizes for perfect employee-survey scores.
Klick says this both negated the data and violated CMS standards against coaching patients.
Close reading of real work and a front-line conversation; CMS rules and top-box logic used as decision criteria.
For brands planning a campaign
A brand evaluating Klick for patient-experience, survey-culture, or healthcare quality campaigns can expect a message centered on using scores to find friction and protect outcomes, with clear warnings against score-chasing, manipulation, or punitive use of metrics.
Klick argues that small supply and workflow failures signal a strained system and drain clinician time.
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A pillow post cites hospital bedding research—nearly 30% of occupied beds lacked proper linens and only 9.6% of patients reported feeling very comfortable—then calculates that a nurse spending 15 minutes hunting a pillow at $1.09 per minute wastes about $16.35 in labor per shift against a $10–15 pillow. The recommended fix is GROSS—Get Rid of Stupid Stuff—with visual Kanban supply systems, frontline-set par levels, and infrastructure treated as a clinical priority.
Uses a unit-level cost calculation and a named framework to turn a small complaint into a leadership decision.
For brands planning a campaign
This is a strong fit for campaigns about operational excellence, supply chain, nursing workflow, or “top of license” promises, especially when the brand wants concrete before-and-after examples rather than abstract culture language.
A recurring argument from Klick is that trust is built or broken in unglamorous mechanics.
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In a post about answering the phone, they contrast big synergy and executive-presence initiatives with an insurance agent who rang twice, promised three options by 3:00 PM, and delivered at 2:45 PM.
They set that against hospital phone trees, full voicemail boxes, and families stuck on hold.
The post asks leaders whether they measure callback times and drop rates, tying trust to respect and follow-through.
Personal service anecdotes as evidence, paired with direct operational questions for leaders.
For brands planning a campaign
Klick can support customer-service, patient-access, or internal-reliability campaigns that need a frontline-credible argument: brand promises fail when callbacks, response times, and basic follow-through are not measured.
In a recurring “Tuesday TRUST³ Tip,” Klick teaches the phrase “We both want...” as a de-escalation tool for high-stakes healthcare conflict.
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The post explains that departments under pressure treat each other as adversaries, while a rope-team image—everyone clipped to the same line—requires alignment on direction. Klick maps this to a proprietary STATE framework and its instruction to Start with a common goal, and references using the words for nearly 30 years.
Signature framework: STATE, with “We both want...” as the practical opening move.
Signature framework: STATE, with “We both want...” as the practical opening move.
For brands planning a campaign
A brand can use Klick for leadership-communication, conflict-resolution, or team-alignment campaigns that need a repeatable phrase and a visual model, not just a general endorsement of collaboration.
Klick’s September 11 remembrance describes being in a Baltimore hospital security meeting when the attacks occurred, moving into a communications plan and command center, coordinating emergency on-site daycare within a half hour, working with the Red Cross on blood donation, and standing up mass casualty protocols while waiting for patients who did not come.
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Klick frames the day as healthcare leadership in crisis: lean in, worry about your own family while caring for others, then pivot from surviving the day to leading through the next.
Crisis leadership and command-center operations
For brands planning a campaign
This topic fits crisis-preparedness, emergency-management, or healthcare-resilience campaigns that need a credible first-person account of command-center decision-making. The post is remembrance rather than a step-by-step playbook, so a brand should use it for context and credibility, not as a training curriculum.
In a personal post about a lightning strike that knocked out air conditioning in Florida, Klick describes slipping toward a victim mindset, then applies the same ideas Klick teaches—self-regulation, the leader’s mirror, and moving from “They” to “I”—to choose a victor mindset.
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The lesson is not that problems do not suck; it is to acknowledge friction, keep humor, and control what can be controlled.
First-person operational-friction story used to demonstrate a self-regulation framework.
For brands planning a campaign
Klick can speak to resilience, burnout, or leadership-mindset campaigns with an accessible story that models a response rather than lecturing. The tone is lighter and more personal than the patient-safety posts, so it fits culture and wellbeing content better than clinical quality content.
Klick presents a giving-back era focused on mentoring the next generation of healthcare leaders and opening up the playbook.
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The HCAHPS post points readers to their book “Simple Doesn’t Mean Easy,” with concrete examples, and offers bulk orders, a virtual book club, or an in-person masterclass. The book also appears in the survey-culture and frontline-friction posts, where they say two chapters cover GROSS and keep a quote on people over numbers at the forefront.
Book and workshop offers are tied to practical healthcare leadership themes, not promoted as generic speaking.
For brands planning a campaign
Brands can evaluate Klick for book-driven programs, leadership masterclasses, team book clubs, or mentoring content. The posts show an existing offer structure around the book, giving campaigns a clear call to action beyond social reach.
Across the posts, Klick regularly ends with a direct question to readers: who is answering your phone, what stupid stuff is blocking your unit, how to shift leaders from hitting the number to securing the safety outcome, when “We both want” would have worked, and when people ask about the steel in the spine.
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Hashtags on the storm post group themes such as HealthcareLeadership, VictimVsVictor, KeepYourCool, and SimpleNotEasy.
Comment prompts are a recurring format.
For brands planning a campaign
Brands can expect posts designed to generate comments and conversation. Campaign calls to action should invite discussion, not just broadcast a message.
Lara Klick's posts describe historical employment at Sinai Hospital in Baltimore around September 11, 2001, and mention the book 'Simple Doesn't Mean Easy,' which they say is available on Amazon and supports direct offers for bulk orders, virtual book clubs, and in-person masterclasses.
Sinai Hospital
Employment · 2001-09-11
In a September 11, 2001 post, Klick describes being in a meeting with Sinai Hospital's director and assistant director of security in Baltimore as part of healthcare operations work.
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The post indicates they worked at Sinai Hospital at that time. Ask directly about any current relationship.
Klick describes 'Simple Doesn't Mean Easy' as a book with concrete examples and frameworks for healthcare leaders, says it is available on Amazon, and invites direct inquiries about bulk orders, virtual book clubs, and in-person masterclasses.
Lara Klick writes about patient experience as an operational and safety problem rather than a scoreboard.
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The clearest entry point is the pair of posts on HCAHPS: one ties two decades of measurement work to the argument that top-box scoring exists to expose where reliability breaks down and that "usually" is not good enough when the patient is your own parent, while the other uses a nurse's account of a previous employer pressuring staff toward "Always" to show what score-chasing costs in data, in CMS compliance, and in people.
From there, follow two threads.
The operations thread prices a nurse's fifteen-minute search for a pillow against the cost of the pillow itself and argues for clearing stupid stuff before buying new technology.
The communication thread, in a recurring Tuesday TRUST³ tip, teaches "We both want..." as the opening move in a tense meeting and places it inside a framework Klick calls STATE.
Two personal posts, one on a Baltimore hospital command center on September 11, 2001 and one on a July lightning strike that knocked out air conditioning in Florida, make the same case at different scales: lean into a crisis, then control your own response.
Readers who want a structured path can start with the two measurement posts, then the frontline friction post, then the conflict framework; the book and masterclass Klick mentions sit on those same themes.
Patient-experience measurement (HCAHPS)Healthcare operationsFrontline operational frictionBehavioral integrityTrust-based communication and de-escalationCrisis leadershipSelf-regulation under pressureClinician workload and wellbeingPatient experienceHealthcare leadershipFirst-person field storiesNamed frameworks and short scriptsDiscussion-prompt postsHealthcare executivesNurse leaders and frontline managers
Charles J. French
French treats patient experience as an operational problem, as Klick does.
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He connects unwanted calls reaching nursing stations to specific HCAHPS categories (quietness of the hospital environment, responsiveness of hospital staff) and the CMS value-based purchasing dollars tied to them.
He also cites one health system blocking 8,000 unwanted calls a day.
That mirrors Klick's link between a nurse's fifteen-minute hunt for a pillow and the experience patients report.
French writes from the vendor and security side.
His argument is that voice is an under-protected attack surface and health systems need a technical control—a voice firewall—in front of it.
He also plugs his booth at HIMSS.
Klick writes from the operator's seat about survey culture, supply basics, callbacks and follow-through, framing the fix as leadership behavior and unit-level routines rather than a product.
Marketers concerned about vishing, deepfake voice fraud or protecting the phone channel should follow French instead.
Brenda S. works the same territory from inside a large health system: care experience, workforce experience and engagement, executive storytelling, and leadership transitions.
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Her account of moving into a director role centers on the idea that transformation happens where people, experience, strategy, storytelling and operations meet. That is close to Klick's insistence that mission language only counts when the floor actually runs.
Klick's posts focus on career narrative and convening.
They announce a role and credit the leaders around them, then describe a six-person dinner where nurse, quality and patient-experience leaders discuss what's hard, followed by an invitation to ten more people to join a San Diego table.
The posts don't analyze measurement, supply logistics or a communication framework.
Follow them for how health-system leaders move between roles and build peer rooms, and for the operational argument and scripts.
Feakins works the same healthcare workforce equation from the staffing side, with a similar split between system and human.
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His recruiter-of-2027 argument is that AI and data should surface the twelve nurses worth talking to today, while the recruiter handles trust, credentialing snags and the close.
That echoes Klick's position that automation fails until the basics behind it work.
Both write about demand moving through a stretched clinical workforce.
Feakins writes about agency economics: travel-nurse demand figures, marketing spend as gas, recruiting capacity as the engine, and the risk of turning up demand without recruiters to answer it.
Klick stays inside the hospital, focusing on patient experience, supplies and callbacks.
Marketers interested in the travel-nurse market, recruiter productivity or staffing-agency capacity should follow Feakins instead.
For a campaign aimed at healthcare executives, Lara Klick’s posts point to a narrow placement decision: their content speaks to healthcare leaders, patient-experience teams, and frontline staff working on hospital operations, trust, and service reliability.
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The only measured audience number on their profile is 3,436 LinkedIn followers as of 9 October 2026.
That shows platform reach, not follower geography, age, gender, employer, occupation, or seniority.
The seven full posts cover recurring subjects: CMS/HCAHPS metrics, leadership communication, frontline supply and workflow friction, crisis operations, and follow-through.
Examples include posts on HCAHPS coaching and survey integrity, pillows and wasted clinical time, and callback reliability and trust.
These topics show what readers are invited to care about, not who reads or acts on the posts.
Ask for recent results on comparable posts about patient-experience operations, leadership communication, and frontline workflow, plus any audience survey or documented source covering employer, role, or job seniority.
Without that evidence, treat the follower count as platform reach, not proof that the audience includes the executives or clinicians targeted by the campaign.
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.
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They do not document a sponsorship program. Ask directly about sponsorship availability, fees, deliverables, timing, and approval needs.
For a patient-experience analytics platform campaign: the platform wants a hospital quality leader to explain to peers how to move teams from survey-score chasing to safety outcomes.
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Fit: strong, with one commercial caveat.
The campaign needs a credible voice on HCAHPS mechanics, CMS boundaries and frontline behavior.
Lara Klick's posts show that expertise directly.
They describe attending CMS's introductory HCAHPS administrator training in 2006 and keeping the binder; explain that Top-Box scoring isolates peak performance on purpose; and warn that coaching patients or pressuring staff to “push for Always” both corrupts the data and violates CMS standards.
They also offer a ready-made narrative: a nurse who hated HCAHPS because a prior employer rewarded perfect scores, followed by Klick's argument that chasing the score builds a punitive culture while chasing the outcome builds a curious one.
It's a specific, defensible argument a vendor can build campaign content around.
The caveat is commercial format.
No sponsorship policy, rate card or media kit is published in the posts.
The visible offers are a book, virtual book club and in-person masterclass, so the practical route is an education-led collaboration rather than a standard sponsored post.
Ask directly about fees and deliverables.
The fit also weakens if the platform wants product cheerleading.
Klick's posts favor operational basics and caution against automating a broken present.
They show a healthcare-facing following, with 3,436 LinkedIn followers.
Ask for audience demographics and engagement data if those affect the buying decision.
When to choose a specialist
For a consumer lifestyle pillow brand campaign: the brand wants short-form posts about sleep comfort, home wellness and retail purchasing.
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Fit: poor.
Klick did write about pillows, but the post is not consumer lifestyle content.
The pillow is a hospital supply item.
The argument is about clinical time, cost and behavioral integrity: a pillow costs $10–15, an RN's fully loaded cost is about $1.09 per minute, and 15 minutes of hunting per shift wastes roughly $16.35 in labor per nurse.
Klick's proposed fix is visual Kanban supply systems and treating infrastructure as a clinical priority—not mattress materials or sleep science.
Their posts cover healthcare leadership, patient experience, frontline operations, trust and crisis communication.
They do not cover consumer sleep, home goods, retail shopping or lifestyle audiences.
A pillow brand could use the operational-waste frame in a B2B hospital-supply campaign, but a consumer wellness campaign would run against the content.
The same poor-fit judgment applies to campaigns that depend on clinical efficacy claims, outcome guarantees or product features Klick has not discussed.
They comment on survey data, operations and communication—not mattress construction, sleep research or retail conversion.
A worked campaign example
Worked campaign angle for a patient-experience analytics platform: “The Score Is Not the Point.”
Run it as three LinkedIn posts or a short webinar plus follow-up.
Opening: a family waits on hold for post-op discharge instructions while a charge nurse waits seventy-two hours for a telemetry monitor repair—Klick's callback-reliability example.
Middle: use their HCAHPS account to show how “push for Always,” prizes for perfect scores and scripted survey talk can make experience data worthless and cross CMS boundaries.
Close: reframe top-box as a safety and high-reliability signal, not a popularity contest, and ask leaders to measure callback times, drop rates and pickup times alongside experience scores.
Call to action: invite quality and nursing leaders to a working session or book club using Klick's book “Simple Doesn't Mean Easy,” with a template for auditing one “stupid stuff” process on a unit.
Useful campaign measures are completed audit templates, webinar registrations from quality or nursing roles, and follow-up conversations about survey culture—not follower count or top-box scores.
The angle draws on their posts about CMS training, the nurse's HCAHPS complaint, the pillow cost calculation and phone-answering.
It fits their discussion-led style, ending each post with a concrete question readers can answer in the comments.
Choose this alternative when the campaign audience is hospital IT, security, risk, or nursing leadership and the problem is the phone itself.
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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.
The material is vendor-anchored.
Both posts promote Mutare's Voice Traffic Filter and a HIMSS booth, so the argument arrives with a product already attached.
Klick's posts, by contrast, read as an operator's account of how experience data is used and misused.
The tradeoff is depth on measurement culture: Klick explains why Top-Box scoring isolates peak performance, why coaching patients or pressuring staff toward top-box answers crosses CMS standards, and what frontline supply friction costs in nurse time.
French supplies none of that, and his subject is call filtering rather than what a hospital does with the score once it has one.
Pick French when calls and security are the campaign problem; pick Klick when the problem is how leaders interpret experience data and what they fix on the unit.
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.
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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.
The posts are career and peer-network announcements.
They do not walk through survey mechanics, CMS constraints, top-box reasoning, or the cost of supply and scheduling friction, leaving little to build a grounded argument from and more to build a persona, event, or access plan from.
A campaign that needs a named operator to show the messy middle of leading change gets something real here; one that needs close readings of how experience data is collected and reported does not.
Confirm audience size, engagement, and commercial availability directly before planning around this person.
Choose this alternative when the buyer is a travel nurse staffing agency or a healthcare workforce operator rather than a hospital quality department.
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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.
The decision being influenced is different in kind.
Feakins' readers decide how to rebuild candidate pipelines and recruiting capacity; Klick's readers decide how to run experience measurement, respond to CMS rules, and remove frontline friction.
HCAHPS, patient experience measures, and supply-level operational fixes do not appear in these posts, so a campaign built on Feakins would shift away from a hospital quality buyer toward staffing and agency leadership, where the metrics are placements, pipeline, and cost per hire.
Both posts carry a commercial point of view from a marketing-services position, which changes the tone a product vendor would inherit.
Lara Klick published seven full LinkedIn posts from 18 May to 24 September 2026, and Klick's account had a follower figure of [figure] on 9 October 2026.
The posts cover patient-experience measurement and HCAHPS, frontline supply friction, callback reliability and baseline service, conflict language, a September 11, 2001 hospital command-center account, and self-regulation under operational stress.
For comparison, four posts from three other healthcare and healthcare-workforce figures published March to October 2026 cover similar topics; there is no audience or engagement data for comparison.
Klick's posts here do not include video transcripts, newsletter issues, copies of the book Klick references, sponsorship details, rate cards, audience demographics or campaign results.
One nurse's view of HCAHPS is Klick's account of that conversation, not an independently verified record.
None of the posts here states that Klick received payment or entered a partnership.
