NRC Health Honors 2026 Award Winners for Outstanding Excellence in Healthcare
NRC Health has announced the winners of its 2026 awards program, recognizing healthcare organizations across the United States for their achievements in patient experience, healthcare experience management, consumer loyalty, innovation, brand performance, and patient-centered care.
The annual awards program highlights hospitals, health systems, medical groups, and specialty providers that have demonstrated a strong commitment to understanding the needs of patients and consumers and using those insights to improve healthcare experiences.
The 2026 honors recognize organizations across a broad spectrum of healthcare settings, including health systems, hospitals, children’s hospitals, specialty hospitals, critical-access hospitals, and medical groups. Through multiple award categories, NRC Health aims to highlight organizations that are delivering measurable improvements in the way patients interact with and experience healthcare.
This year’s program also introduces two new awards: the Innovation Co-Design Award and the Best in Brand Award. The additions expand the program’s focus beyond traditional patient experience metrics to recognize collaboration, innovation, consumer perception, and healthcare brand performance.
The 2026 award winners will be formally recognized during Human Understanding Beyond | HUB26, NRC Health’s event taking place in Nashville on September 2, 2026.
Recognizing Excellence Across Healthcare
Patient experience has become an increasingly important component of healthcare delivery. Patients and families evaluate healthcare organizations not only on clinical outcomes but also on communication, accessibility, responsiveness, convenience, trust, and the overall quality of their interactions with providers and staff.
NRC Health’s annual awards program is designed to recognize organizations that demonstrate excellence across these areas.
The awards celebrate healthcare providers that actively listen to patients and consumers, analyze feedback, identify opportunities for improvement, and implement changes designed to create better experiences.
This approach reflects a broader shift in healthcare toward patient-centered care. Organizations are increasingly using patient feedback and consumer insights to understand what matters most to the people they serve.
Rather than viewing patient experience as a single department or initiative, leading healthcare organizations are incorporating experience management into broader organizational strategies.
The 2026 awards recognize organizations that have demonstrated this commitment across different healthcare environments.
Broad Range of Award Categories
NRC Health’s 2026 awards program includes several categories focused on different dimensions of healthcare experience and organizational performance.
Among the major categories are Excellence in Patient Experience, Excellence in Experience Management, Consumer Loyalty, Innovation Co-Design, and Best in Brand.
Each category addresses a different aspect of the relationship between healthcare organizations and the people they serve.
The Excellence in Patient Experience category focuses on organizations that demonstrate strong performance in creating positive experiences for patients.
Excellence in Experience Management recognizes organizations that have developed effective approaches to managing and improving experiences throughout the healthcare journey.
The Consumer Loyalty category focuses on the strength of relationships between healthcare organizations and consumers, including factors that influence whether patients continue to choose and recommend a healthcare provider.
The two newer categories expand the program’s scope by recognizing innovation and brand performance.
New Innovation Co-Design Award
One of the major additions to the 2026 awards program is the Innovation Co-Design Award.
The new award recognizes partner organizations that worked closely with NRC Health to pursue significant innovation.
Co-design represents an approach in which organizations collaborate with partners and stakeholders to develop solutions rather than relying solely on traditional top-down approaches.
In healthcare, co-design can help organizations better understand the needs of patients, consumers, clinicians, and other stakeholders before developing new services, processes, or technologies.
By introducing the Innovation Co-Design Award, NRC Health is recognizing organizations that have demonstrated a willingness to collaborate in developing innovative approaches to healthcare challenges.
The award also highlights the importance of partnerships in advancing healthcare experience.
As healthcare organizations face increasingly complex challenges, collaboration can provide opportunities to combine different areas of expertise and develop solutions that are more closely aligned with real-world needs.
New Best in Brand Award
The second new award for 2026 is the Best in Brand Award, which recognizes organizations with the highest brand perception among healthcare consumers.
Brand perception can influence how consumers evaluate healthcare organizations and whether they feel confident choosing a particular provider.
Healthcare brands are shaped by many factors, including patient experiences, reputation, communication, service quality, accessibility, and interactions across physical and digital channels.
By introducing a category specifically focused on brand perception, NRC Health is acknowledging the connection between healthcare experience and consumer trust.
A strong healthcare brand can help organizations differentiate themselves in competitive markets while reinforcing confidence among existing and prospective patients.
The Best in Brand Award therefore provides another perspective on how healthcare organizations are perceived by the consumers they serve.
Using Patient and Consumer Feedback
A central principle of NRC Health’s awards program is the use of patient and consumer feedback.
Award recipients are selected using methodologies tailored to individual categories. These approaches incorporate factors such as patient feedback, consumer perceptions, brand reputation, and experience data gathered across multiple healthcare settings.
This data-driven approach provides a foundation for evaluating healthcare organizations based on measurable indicators rather than recognition alone.
Patient feedback can provide valuable insights into how individuals experience care. It can highlight areas where organizations are performing well while also identifying opportunities for improvement.
Consumer perception data offers another perspective by examining how people view healthcare organizations and their brands.
Together, these sources can provide a more comprehensive understanding of healthcare performance.
The awards therefore recognize organizations that are not only delivering services but are also paying attention to how those services are experienced by patients and consumers.
Importance of Listening to Patients
Listening to patients has become a fundamental element of patient-centered healthcare.
Patients interact with healthcare organizations at numerous points, from scheduling appointments and accessing information to meeting clinicians, receiving treatment, managing follow-up care, and navigating billing or other administrative processes.
Each interaction can influence the patient’s overall perception of the organization.
Organizations that collect and respond to feedback can identify problems that may not be immediately apparent through clinical or operational measures alone.
For example, patients may provide insights into communication difficulties, appointment processes, accessibility, care coordination, or other aspects of their experience.
Using this information to make improvements can help organizations create more responsive and patient-centered systems.
The NRC Health awards recognize organizations that have demonstrated this type of commitment to listening and acting on feedback.
Experience Management as a Strategic Priority
The recognition of Excellence in Experience Management reflects the growing importance of experience management within healthcare organizations.
Experience management involves understanding and improving interactions across the entire care journey.
This can require coordination across multiple departments and levels of an organization. Clinical teams, administrative staff, leadership, digital teams, marketing departments, and other functions may all influence the patient experience.
Effective experience management can therefore require organizations to look beyond individual interactions and examine how different parts of the healthcare system work together.
The award category recognizes organizations that have developed strategies for managing these experiences and using insights to drive improvements.
This focus is particularly relevant as healthcare becomes increasingly consumer-oriented.
Patients have more opportunities to research providers, compare services, read reviews, and make decisions about where and how they receive care. Healthcare organizations must therefore consider experience as an important part of their overall value proposition.
Recognizing Consumer Loyalty
Consumer loyalty is another important component of the awards program.
Loyalty can be influenced by a patient’s overall experience with a healthcare organization, including the quality of communication, convenience, trust, perceived value, and confidence in the care received.
For healthcare providers, strong consumer relationships can contribute to long-term engagement and continued use of services.
Recognizing consumer loyalty highlights organizations that have successfully developed relationships that extend beyond individual healthcare encounters.
This is especially important as healthcare organizations seek to build lasting connections with patients and communities.
Excellence Across Different Care Settings
The 2026 awards program recognizes organizations across a wide range of care environments.
This includes large health systems as well as individual hospitals, children’s hospitals, specialty hospitals, critical-access hospitals, and medical groups.
The inclusion of different types of organizations recognizes that excellence in healthcare experience can take many forms.
Large health systems may have extensive resources and complex organizational structures, while smaller and critical-access hospitals may operate within very different environments.
Children’s hospitals have their own unique challenges because they must consider the experiences of both young patients and their families.
Specialty hospitals and medical groups also serve distinct patient populations and healthcare needs.
By recognizing organizations across these settings, the awards demonstrate that patient-centered care is relevant throughout the healthcare system.
Encouraging Healthcare Innovation
Innovation is increasingly important as healthcare organizations seek new ways to improve patient experiences and address changing consumer expectations.
Technology, digital health services, data analytics, artificial intelligence, new care delivery models, and redesigned workflows are among the tools healthcare organizations can use to improve how care is delivered.
However, innovation is not limited to technology.
New approaches to communication, care coordination, patient engagement, service delivery, and organizational culture can also produce meaningful improvements.
The introduction of the Innovation Co-Design Award reinforces this broader understanding of innovation by highlighting collaboration as an important part of developing new solutions.
Celebrating Healthcare Leaders
The 2026 NRC Health award winners represent organizations that have demonstrated strong performance in areas that are increasingly important to the future of healthcare.
Their recognition provides examples of how healthcare providers can use patient feedback, consumer insights, experience data, innovation, and brand strategy to improve relationships with the people they serve.
For healthcare leaders, these examples can provide ideas and inspiration for developing their own patient experience and consumer engagement strategies.
The awards also create an opportunity for organizations to share successful approaches and learn from one another.
Winners to Be Recognized at HUB26
NRC Health will recognize its 2026 award winners during Human Understanding Beyond | HUB26 in Nashville on September 2, 2026.
The event will provide an opportunity to celebrate the organizations receiving recognition while bringing together healthcare professionals and leaders interested in patient experience, consumer engagement, innovation, and healthcare transformation.
The awards ceremony will serve as a formal acknowledgment of organizations that have demonstrated excellence throughout the year.
The 2026 NRC Health awards program reflects the evolving priorities of the healthcare industry.
As healthcare organizations continue to place greater emphasis on patient-centered care, consumer expectations, loyalty, brand reputation, and experience management are becoming increasingly important components of organizational strategy.
The addition of the Innovation Co-Design and Best in Brand awards demonstrates how the definition of healthcare excellence is expanding. Organizations are now being recognized not only for how they deliver care but also for how they collaborate, innovate, build trust, and are perceived by consumers.
At the heart of the awards program is the principle that healthcare organizations can improve when they listen carefully to patients and consumers and use what they learn to make meaningful changes.
Through its 2026 awards, NRC Health is highlighting organizations that have demonstrated this commitment across a variety of care settings.
The recognition of these healthcare organizations underscores the importance of continuously improving the patient journey. From hospitals and health systems to medical groups and specialty providers, organizations that prioritize human understanding, meaningful feedback, innovation, and consumer trust can play an important role in shaping the future of healthcare.
The full list of 2026 winners and information about the award methodologies is available through NRC Health’s awards program. The organizations will be formally celebrated at HUB26 in Nashville, marking another milestone in recognizing healthcare providers committed to creating better experiences for patients, families, consumers, and communities.
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