Celebrating Our People: Tyler Morgan - Patient Experience Coach

“It’s a three-for-one deal,” John Tyler Morgan, who goes by Tyler, said of his job of making sure patients at Saint Joseph London have the best experience possible.

Multiple times a day, Tyler, patient experience coach, makes the rounds checking hospital inventory and supplies while he also talks to caregivers about how their jobs are going. While he’s at it, he pops in to see patients—the third leg of the “deal”— to ask how they’re doing and whether they need anything.

It represents a culture shift in patient experience, he said, which traditionally is characterized by a heavy emphasis on patient input.

“We like to approach it from our caregiving standpoint,” Tyler explained. “We have a mindset that the better we take care of our caregivers—our nurses, our CNAs, all of our departments throughout the hospital—the better we take care of them, the easier their jobs are, the better care they take of our patients.”

When he started his job three years ago, he followed the traditional approach, but the post-discharge patient feedback data did not change. “I made it up in my mind that, something’s up here—this is not the secret sauce,” he said. He began putting more emphasis on the role of caregivers, “and that’s when we started seeing the numbers matching to what we were seeing with our own eyes here at ground zero.” 

What he calls “a culture shift” in patient experience is one factor in Tyler being named Saint Joseph London’s 2024 Employee of the Year and overall Employee of the Year for Saint Joseph Health. 

It's important to attend to caregivers as well as patients, Tyler said: “In the health care world, people have home lives, too, and stuff happens. And yet a health care worker is charged with coming in and taking care of somebody else’s problems every single day, as opposed to carrying the load of their own. So it’s a very stressful job to begin with, but just as much as it’s physically demanding, it’s mentally demanding, too.”

He holds two seemingly disparate bachelor’s degrees from University of the Cumberlands—one in public health, the other in criminal justice. The latter probably helps in his job more than the former, he said, giving him an insight into “knowing the psychology behind people, being able to read people”—both staff and patients.

When Tyler graduated from college in 2015, he spent a year selling John Deere tractors, yet another people-reading experience. An avid golfer—he played golf in college—he played with Saint Joseph London’s pharmacy director, which led to a job in the pharmacy in 2016 before taking his current position in 2022. He calls it “divine intervention.”

His calling is to share his positive energy and smiles with others, he said, noting that in health care, it’s easy to become dispirited and forget that the losses and heartaches are offset by healing and recovery. 

“I try to bring high energy every day, just to keep people’s spirits uplifted, to keep our lamps burning hot, burning bright,” he said.

Tyler is also heavily involved in the hospital’s new hire orientation process and 75-day new employee follow-up, because of the importance of patient experience in hospital operations. He said he also cherishes the aspect of his job that sends him out into the community to talk about Saint Joseph Health, like staffing the hospital’s booth at the World Chicken Festival or speaking at a local chamber of commerce meeting. 

In addition to its cheerful buoyancy, Tyler’s voice retains its thick eastern Kentucky accent, which he says is an asset in his work. “It relates well with our patients from this area,” he said. “It’s good to have a hometown guy or girl that can speak the same language, that has kind of the same ideology, the same values as they do.“

The Jackson County native describes himself as “a small town guy,” and still lives in McKee with his wife, Kyla, and their toddler daughter and infant son, both born at Saint Joseph London. The family loves camping, traveling the state and staying in different campgrounds.

Tyler said he is motivated by his faith and his love for people, which work in tandem with Saint Joseph’s values and byword of humankindness. 

“At the end of the day, it all boils down to connection,” he said. “People don’t necessarily plan and want to come to the hospital, but there’s going to come a time in our lives when we’re all going to need it. It’s our thinking and understanding here at Saint Joseph that we want to be the hands and feet of Christ, ready and waiting for those folks when they have to come to us.”