The 2026 Qualtrics Healthcare Trends Report draws on responses from more than 60,000 patients and nearly 4,000 clinicians in the United States, collected in November and December 2025, to examine four forces shaping healthcare—and how leaders, with the right data and tools, can act on what they learn.
- Trust is the foundation to making patients feel safe and cared for—but a one-size-fits-all approach won’t work and can alienate those whose trust is already hardest to earn
- Burnout is rising among health care workers, and it is degrading the care patients experience
- A culture of physical and psychological safety is a powerful predictor of burnout
- Healthcare workers are increasingly ready for AI; the question is whether their organizations are meeting them there
Trust drives everything—but it is earned differently with different patients
Every healthcare provider knows trust is critical to making patients feel safe and cared for, with findings showing a 75-point gap in NPS between patients who report high trust compared to those that report low trust in their hospital and clinicians. So what actually builds trust? Three things stand out in the data.
- Patients feel genuinely cared for
- Staff teamwork
- Ease of access to care
However, it’s too simple to look at trust as something that can be earned with a one-size-fits-all approach. The challenge for healthcare providers is knowing how to build trust across generations and other patient populations, each with its own unique needs.
Middle-aged patients react most sharply to poor staff coordination. When they perceive teamwork breaking down—coordination gaps, repeated questions between care team members, or poor handoffs—trust drops to 4%, a mere fraction of the trust level among both younger and older patients.
Younger patients present a different challenge. Even when they rate ease of access highly, trust reaches only 56%, lower than that of older patients. For a generation raised on seamless digital experiences, investments in access may be more of an expectation than an exception, and don't carry the same impact in earning their trust.
Underserved patients who already lack adequate access to care need to feel being cared for as an individual to earn their trust.
The practical implication is significant. A healthcare organization that designs one patient experience and applies it universally will, at best, serve some patients well and miss others entirely. At worst, it will deepen existing disparities by consistently failing the populations whose trust is already hardest to earn. Understanding what different patient populations actually need—and designing for it—is what turns a single good visit into lasting trust.
Compare the populations you care for to the populations you hear from and look for any
groups that aren’t well represented. The result may be that you need to evolve the listening post or method. Once you build confidence that you’ve got high quality data, then design key emotional moments thoughtfully, and—perhaps the bigger challenge—deliver these consistently.
–Dr. Adrienne Boissy, Chief Medical Officer, Qualtrics
When clinicians burn out, patients feel it
Burnout is rising, largely driven by increases in staff burnout, and the damage extends to the care experience for patients.
Clinicians experiencing burnout rate themselves measurably lower on dimensions that directly affect patients. Communication is worse. There’s less cross-functional collaboration. And they don’t feel safe enough to speak up if something feels wrong. These effects can be felt in every patient interaction, every care decision, and every outcome.
The key drivers of burnout that emerge highlight the systemic nature of burnout: unmanageable workloads, a poor culture of safety, insufficient support for work-life balance, lack of continuous improvement in how work gets done, and not being treated with respect at work. Individual actions alone cannot fix system-level causes. They require r esponses that match the root causes.
An example of this kind of system-wide change is ambient listening technology that uses AI to take notes during conversations between patients and providers, allowing doctors to be more present and removing a source of friction in clinicians’ workload. When clinicians don’t have to spend hours on documentation, they can spend more time with patients and their recovery. Early adoption data is showing meaningful returns in both productivity and clinician well-being.
Burnout is a system signal that requires a system-wide response. At times there is still an
implication that burnout is an individual failing or weakness…and a preponderance of evidence suggests otherwise. I would reframe as: how might we build systems that care for the people within them so they can deliver extraordinary performance and thrive as humans? Technology could be a burnout accelerant or an antidote; clear articulation of its goals and how it enhances the lives of our people and our patients should be a part of every implementation.
–Dr. Adrienne Boissy, Chief Medical Officer, Qualtrics
Safety culture is a powerful predictor of burnout
The data draws a direct line between a culture of safety and clinician burnout. Where that safety culture is strongest, predicted clinician burnout sits at just 13%. Where it's middling, that number climbs to 58%. At the lowest end, it reaches 93%.
Simply saying there is a culture of safety doesn’t count. It is built by being visible in daily operations—the way decisions get made, the way concerns get raised and addressed, the way people are treated on a typical day.
It shows up in patient safety and physical safety for clinicians and staff, as well as psychological safety reflected in the way managers and teams support each other’s well-being and allow for tough questions to be asked without fear of retribution.
Culture of safety is used to describe an environment of norms, beliefs, and values that prioritize safety and is evaluated by behaviors that are rewarded, expected, tolerated and accepted. The safety culture often has multiple levels and is measured by employees’ own assessment of their work environments and includes their ability to speak up without retaliation. How organizations respond to culture of safety concerns is a trust builder or breaker: if we say safety is important, then we need to model transparency, just culture, and a willingness to learn. If we can’t, don’t, or won’t, don’t bother sending out next year’s surveys.
–Dr.Adrienne Boissy, Chief Medical Officer, Qualtrics
Clinicians’ comfort with AI is surging
Individual AI comfort among healthcare workers rose significantly from 2024 to 2025. A majority of clinicians are now comfortable with AI across most use cases—including uses like responding empathetically, summarizing conversations, and analyzing patient data. Workers showed a notable increase in how comfortable they are with AI listening in rooms, increasing from 28% to 46% over the past year, using AI to respond empathetically (from 33% to 52%),
and prompting what to do or say (from 32% to 50%).
But even as their individual comfort with using AI climbs, healthcare workers have a much lower level of confidence in their organizations’ AI strategy, a gap that could hinder organizations from realizing the full benefits of AI when it comes to improving experiences for both patients and employees.
Physicians are leading the way with AI adoption, with nearly three-quarters (72%) saying they’re comfortable with AI, up from 42% just a year ago. Nurses and other workers are also increasingly comfortable with using AI, even though they are moving at a slower pace.
AI comfort can’t be forced—but a strong supportive environment goes a long way. The top predictors of comfort with AI are being rewarded for risk-taking, quality communication and trust in senior leadership. To be successful, AI implementation plans need to pair technical support with human support.
Even if an organization does not yet have a comprehensive AI strategy, it has the opportunity to articulate guiding principles, how use cases will be evaluated, and guidelines for employee usage. While clinicians are ready for AI, I think most also want to know that their organizations are deploying it with the same values they bring to the practice of medicine—a focus not only on offering benefit, but also on not doing harm, maintaining integrity and transparency, inclusion of patients and clinicians in how it is built, and clear accountability for outcomes. When organizations can demonstrate that type of value resonance, the trust will follow.
–Dr. Adrienne Boissy, Chief Medical Officer, Qualtrics
Read the full 2026 Qualtrics Healthcare Trends Report for all the data and insights, and
strategic advice from Qualtrics experts.
