TL;DR: Ochsner Health partnered with Yoodli to give entry- and mid-level leaders a private, repeatable way to practice the conversations that are hardest to get right: addressing performance, developing careers, and restoring trust. Through a structured leadership development experience, leaders completed AI roleplay scenarios and demonstrated improvement across custom goals. The result: leaders who feel more prepared, a development team with objective data to act on, and a scalable model for strengthening leadership capability across a complex, distributed health system.
Background
Ochsner Health is a leading healthcare system across the Gulf South, focused on delivering high-quality, reliable care to the patients and communities they serve. Their leadership development team partners with stakeholders across the system to strengthen leader effectiveness, particularly in areas that directly impact patient access, quality and safety, and employee and patient experience.
The Challenge Before Yoodli
Leaders at Ochsner regularly faced high-stakes conversations that shaped team performance, employee engagement, and ultimately patient care. Three conversation types stood out as both common and consistently challenging: addressing declining performance, conducting career development discussions, and restoring trust after it has been strained or broken.
While leaders were introduced to frameworks and best practices, opportunities for meaningful, repeatable skill practice were limited. In a healthcare system as large and complex as Ochsner, it was difficult to implement conversation practice that is both consistent across the organization and scalable for large numbers of leaders.
There were also significant gaps in feedback. Leaders were frequently focused on providing feedback to their teams, but fewer mechanisms existed to give leaders targeted, objective feedback on their own communication skills.
The team at Ochsner knew that when leaders are underprepared or avoid these conversations, the cost is felt by their teams and ultimately by patients. Underdeveloped conversation skills can negatively impact the employee experience, individual performance, and a person’s decision to stay with a team or the organization.
The Solution
Ochsner’s leadership development team partnered with Yoodli to design a structured, practice-based AI roleplay experience for entry- to mid-level leaders. The program was built around three core conversation types: performance, career development, and trust restoration, with Yoodli’s platform fully customized to reflect Ochsner’s organizational context, language, and leadership standards.
Why Yoodli
Ochsner selected Yoodli for its combination of realistic, customizable roleplay, robust analytics, and ability to scale across a large, geographically distributed system. The platform allows Ochsner to reach leaders across different regions and audiences that the central team cannot visit regularly, while still delivering consistent, high-quality practice.
Implementation and how Yoodli was used:
Program Design
The leadership development team, in partnership with senior leadership, identified a need for entry to mid-level leaders to have a structured way of practicing and improving how they approached critical conversations. Participating leaders represented a range of roles and experience levels, most managing teams and responsible for navigating complex interpersonal situations.
Each leader worked through roleplay scenarios spanning the three conversation types. The Ochsner team and their subject matter experts built out a set of custom goals, each with its own scoring criteria and coaching language, in order to make feedback feel specific and relevant rather than generic. To keep practice realistic, Yoodli featured three distinct AI personas (enthusiastic, blunt, and skeptical), giving leaders a chance to navigate the kinds of personalities they would actually encounter.
Leaders had a defined practice period with flexibility in how they engaged, as this was designed to fit into a busy day while still driving progress. There were no grades on a first try, no manager watching over their shoulder, just a low-stakes space to try, stumble, and get better.
- Leaders completed roleplay scenarios across three conversation types
- Twelve custom goals were designed in partnership with subject matter experts, customized with user-facing descriptions, scoring criteria, and analytical explanations
- Three distinct AI personas, enthusiastic, blunt, and skeptical, gave leaders experience navigating a range of personality types
- Practice was self-paced, judgment-free, and repeatable, allowing leaders to build confidence over time
THE RESULTS
The data told a clear story: practice worked. Rather than improving in just one area, leaders strengthened goals across core dimensions of effective leadership communication:
Driving Ownership and Accountability
Goals such as empowering ownership, clarifying expectations, clarity on growth goals, and practicing accountability saw some of the largest gains overall. These behaviors are critical for setting direction, reinforcing standards, and ensuring team members take responsibility for outcomes.
Building Trust and Psychological Safety
Leaders also improved in confronting reality, talking truthfully, extending trust, creating transparency, fostering psychological safety, and keeping commitments. These are essential for fostering open dialogue and strong team relationships, particularly in high-stakes environments.
Shared Understanding and Alignment
Goals such as perspective-taking and working toward shared solutions showed improvement, reflecting stronger confidence in addressing challenges directly while maintaining alignment and respect.
Several key patterns stood out in the data:
- The three goals with the largest improvement—empowering ownership, extending trust, and clarifying expectations—were also among the lowest starting scores, suggesting that targeted practice helped address the areas of greatest initial need.
- Leaders demonstrated progress across both relational and execution-focused skills, reinforcing that effective leadership communication requires both.
WHAT LEADERS SAID
The numbers provided by Yoodli analytics reflect improvement on paper, however what leaders described as the biggest shift was in how they were showing up for their teams after their training. They talked about getting better at stepping back instead of jumping in with answers, creating space for team members to take ownership, recognizing patterns in how they asked questions and listening more carefully to the responses, and setting clearer expectations from the start of a conversation rather than trying to course-correct later. Senior leadership has also seen the impact of this work:
“Yoodli provided our leaders with a valuable opportunity to practice engaging in courageous conversations in a private, low-risk setting. The platform delivered immediate, actionable feedback—particularly around tone and word choice—while incorporating a variety of scenarios and personality types. As a result, we have seen a meaningful improvement in both the quality of these discussions and in leaders’ confidence to thoughtfully engage and remain present in challenging conversations.”
— Stephanie Wells, System Vice President-Revenue Cycle, Ochsner Health
THE IMPACT ON OCHSNER’S BUSINESS NEEDS
These leadership conversations directly impact patient access, quality and safety, and employee and patient experience. Patient access depends on leaders who can set clear expectations, address performance gaps early, and empower team members to take ownership of throughput, scheduling, and handoffs. Practicing these conversations helps leaders surface barriers faster and reduce avoidable friction in patient care. Quality and safety are strengthened when leaders consistently create psychological safety and talk truthfully. Leaders who are practiced in confronting reality without blame are more likely to hear about risks and concerns before they escalate. Skills such as clarifying expectations, extending trust, and holding people accountable are the same skills required in highly complex care environments. Employee and patient experience hinge on daily leadership interactions. When leaders listen more carefully, resist jumping straight to solutions, and involve team members in problem-solving, employees experience greater respect, clarity, and ownership. That experience is inseparable from the experience patients ultimately receive.
This kind of practice is especially powerful because it happens before the real consequences are at stake. By rehearsing critical conversations, leaders build muscle memory they can draw on when the pressure is real. Instead of learning through mistakes that affect people and patients, leaders arrive more prepared, intentional, and consistent. AI-enabled practice helps reduce risk and strengthen performance readiness. It strengthens the human interactions for Ochsner team members to deliver safe, timely, high-quality care at scale.
WHAT’S NOW POSSIBLE
For Ochsner’s leadership development team, the most valuable output wasn’t just better-prepared leaders, but also visibility. They had objective, scenario-based data on how their leaders communicate, not filtered through a manager’s perception or a self-assessment, but captured through structured practice in controlled conditions.
That kind of data changed what’s possible for learning and development. The team can now see which skills need more investment, which leaders are ready and which need more support, and where to focus development resources across a large, distributed system. It’s the difference between designing programs based on intuition and designing them based on evidence.
WHAT’S NEXT FOR OCHSNER
The results from this initial experience gave Ochsner’s leadership development team enough confidence to expand. What began as a focused pilot cohort has grown into a broader rollout in Yoodli across the organization, reaching more leaders, more functions, and more conversation types.
The team is now focused on connecting practice to performance, examining whether the gains leaders showed in Yoodli translate to observable changes in how they lead their teams day to day. That includes direct-report feedback, on-the-job behavior, and longer-term retention and engagement outcomes.
The ambition is bigger than a single program. Ochsner sees AI-enabled practice as a core part of how they develop leaders at scale, and this work has served as an important foundation.
ADVICE FOR OTHER HEALTHCARE ORGANIZATIONS
The Ochsner team offered three pieces of advice they’d tell any organization considering this kind of program:
- Bring your subject matter experts in early. The scenarios and goals only feel real if they reflect the actual language, context, and challenges of your organization. Don’t leave that customization to chance.
- Build your governance structure before you launch. Think through who owns the admin, how programs are organized, and how you’ll use the data coming out of the tool. It’s much easier to set up the right structure at the start than to untangle it later.
- Stay curious about what else is possible. Ochsner started with a focused exploration of the tool. The use cases have already expanded, and they’re just getting started.
Want to learn how Yoodli can support training and leadership development at your organization? Contact our team.
