NewsEmployee Experience20 May 2026 · 4 min read

Qualtrics Closes Press Ganey Forsta Deal, Bringing New Healthcare Workforce Insights Into Its AI Platform

Qualtrics says the acquisition will help healthcare providers better understand the link between employee experience, burnout, and patient outcomes as the industry pushes toward more predictive AI-driven operations

Kristian McCann

Qualtrics Press Ganey Forsta healthcare workforce insights

Qualtrics has officially completed its $6.75 billion acquisition of Press Ganey Forsta, bringing one of the healthcare sector’s largest experience datasets into its AI-powered Experience Management (XM) platform. The move, first announced in late 2025, marks a major expansion of Qualtrics’ ambitions in healthcare and signals how the company is positioning itself around AI-driven experience intelligence.

Together, the companies now claim to support more than 41,000 healthcare facilities, including the majority of hospitals across the US.

Qualtrics claims the move will help healthcare organizations enter a new era. Rather than simply collecting feedback after interactions take place, providers are increasingly looking for tools that can predict issues and trigger interventions before problems escalate.

From Feedback Collection to Predictive Performance

Press Ganey Forsta brings extensive experience in patient, clinician, and employee experience measurement across healthcare systems, alongside customer research and Voice of the Customer capabilities. By integrating those assets into the Qualtrics ecosystem, the company aims to create a more intelligent and proactive experience platform.

According to Qualtrics, the newly combined dataset represents the world’s largest healthcare experience dataset. The company believes that scale is becoming increasingly important as enterprises rely more heavily on AI systems that require both operational and experiential context to make better decisions.

Jason Maynard, CEO of Qualtrics, argued that healthcare organizations are no longer competing solely against local providers. Instead, patients increasingly compare their healthcare experiences to the seamless digital interactions delivered by companies in retail, hospitality, and travel.

He said patients now arrive “informed, researched, empowered, anxious, and expectation-hungry, with an AI doctor in their pocket.”

Maynard also described AI as fundamentally reshaping consumer expectations across every industry. According to him, the real competitive differentiator is now the “experience gap,” or the difference between what customers expect and what organizations are capable of delivering. He argued that Qualtrics’ XM AI platform provides the human understanding and contextual intelligence that large language models alone cannot deliver.

The company believes the acquisition will help healthcare organizations move away from retrospective survey analysis toward predictive experience intelligence. Rather than identifying dissatisfaction after it happens, providers could potentially anticipate friction points, model patient journeys, and intervene before negative experiences affect outcomes, trust, or retention.

Qualtrics said the combined platform could enable “AI-driven synthetic experience intelligence systems” capable of predicting human needs and orchestrating more personalized experiences. The strategy reflects a broader industry trend in which vendors are attempting to combine behavioral data, operational signals, and emotional context into a unified AI decision-making layer.

Why Frontline Healthcare Workers Are Central to This Strategy

The acquisition also highlights a broader challenge facing the healthcare industry: frontline workers remain among the most underserved employee groups despite carrying some of the highest operational and emotional burdens.

Healthcare providers continue to struggle with burnout, retention issues, staffing shortages, and rising administrative pressure. Clinicians and frontline staff are increasingly expected to deliver personalized patient experiences while operating within overstretched systems. In many organizations, employee engagement programs and digital workplace investments have historically lagged behind operational demands.

That imbalance has become more visible as healthcare organizations attempt to modernize patient experiences. Improving patient satisfaction becomes significantly harder when the workforce itself is exhausted, disengaged, or overwhelmed. In healthcare environments, staffing problems do not simply affect operational efficiency. They can directly impact patient safety, clinical outcomes, and long-term trust in providers.

This is where Qualtrics appears to see a major opportunity. By combining patient experience data with employee and clinician experience signals, the company is positioning its platform as a way to help healthcare operators identify friction earlier and better understand the relationship between workforce conditions and patient outcomes.

AI-driven experience platforms are increasingly being positioned not simply as customer service tools, but as operational systems capable of supporting retention, workforce engagement, and care delivery itself.

Organizations may know when appointments are canceled or when turnover increases, but understanding the emotional drivers behind those behaviors requires deeper contextual insight. Qualtrics believes experiential data can provide that missing layer.

Improving Healthcare Experience Starts With Supporting Staff

Frontline healthcare workers remain among the most underserved employees in large organizations despite operating in one of the most demanding environments. Clinicians, nurses, and support staff continue to face high levels of burnout, staffing shortages, and emotional exhaustion, all while being expected to deliver better patient experiences under growing operational pressure.

That challenge has become increasingly important for healthcare providers because workforce conditions are closely tied to patient outcomes.

Qualtrics appears to be positioning the combined platform as a way to connect patient, clinician, and employee experience data, helping organizations identify operational friction earlier and better understand the causes of burnout and disengagement. The broader goal is to help healthcare operators move from reactive workforce management toward more proactive interventions.

Ultimately, the acquisition highlights how healthcare organizations are increasingly treating employee experience as a core part of operational performance rather than a secondary HR concern.