Experience Matters. Now More Than Ever.

Sonia Rhodes

Founder and CEO
The Experience Lab

Sonia Rhodes is the founder and CEO of The Experience Lab – an incubator of ideas and an accelerator of action – bringing Experience design and cultural transformation principles to the health care industry. The Experience Lab partners with visionary health care systems and executives to imagine, design, and bring to life a new kind of health care Experience for team members, providers, patients, and guests and is home to Inside Out –The National Experience Transformation Collaborative. 

Sonia is a pioneer in the realm of health care Experience Design, leading the way in the industry for more than 20 years. At Sharp HealthCare, a San Diego, CA-based not-for-profit- health system, she was the nation’s first health system executive to lead organizational Experience transformation. Sonia conceived, launched, and led the strategy, architecture, and implementation of The Sharp Experience – an organization-wide culture and Experience transformation endeavor spanning Sharp’s 30 locations and 18,000+ team members. By incorporating Experience design principles at every level, Sharp garnered unprecedented results – increasing market share, net revenue, team member/provider/patient engagement, and improving quality and safety outcomes. As a result, in 2007 Sharp HealthCare earned the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award – the nation’s highest presidential honor for organizational excellence. Sonia created and led Sharp’s corporate university, designing a comprehensive learning platform for educating and developing more than 1,500 leaders and 18,000 team members and she also led Sharp’s system-wide consumer strategy, marketing technologies, research endeavors, and documentary storytelling.

Sonia is an acclaimed national speaker, executive producer of STIR, A Collision of Uncommon Concepts and Conversations, co-author of The Complete* Guide to Transforming the Patient Experience (HCPro, 2009), and an Emmy award-winning producer of the television documentary series, Stories of the Sharp Experience.  In addition to her passion for creating a more human health care Experience, Sonia donates her time to various non-profit health and education boards.