Outstanding then, influential now: Former HHS Outstanding Senior, now alumna brings hospitality to health care at IU Health

Written By: Rebecca Hoffa, rhoffa@purdue.edu

Abigail Hayes in 2020 (left) and present (right).

Abigail Hayes, a 2020 Purdue University White Lodging-J.W. Marriott, Jr. School of Hospitality and Tourism Management (HTM) alumna, took Indiana University Health’s West Region (which includes hospitals and medical offices in the west central part of Indiana) from low performance in patient experience to one of the highest-performing parts of the organization in just two years, pushing the region’s metrics toward some of the best patient experiences in the nation.

Her secret? Bringing hospitality to health care.

“I manage all of our voice-of-customer channels,” said Hayes, who now serves as regional director of patient experience for IU Health. “Any way that a patient can provide feedback, I am monitoring that feedback. I am responsible for those metrics and the performance of my locations. I also do all of our long-term strategic planning on how we’ll improve patient interactions over time. So, I’m thinking about not only short-term process improvement projects and training for team members but also long-term where we might need to go as we start thinking about opening new service lines.”

Hayes said while bedside manner is often attributed as something that’s inherent, she has implemented training based on her hospitality background that has helped physicians across roughly 140 locations to see successful results in feedback from patients.

“(Hospitality) can be taught, and I was taught it at Purdue,” Hayes said. “There are frameworks for service excellence. There are frameworks for good bedside manner. There are processes you can put in place that enable people to be able to make choices for their patients that are more service-centered. I’m the only person who has a hospitality background that’s ever been in this role. We lead the state in our patient experience metrics. I’ve seen the greatest year-over-year growth we’ve ever seen as a region under my leadership over the last few years. There’s metric evidence that this works and that hospitality is teaching a science. That skillset is valuable and can be applied in other industries.”

Often coming back to the College of Health and Human Sciences (HHS) to give guest lectures or sponsor class projects, Hayes is a Boilermaker through and through. Five years removed from earning the college’s Outstanding Senior recognition for HTM, Hayes said she feels the responsibility to pass her knowledge and success down to others.

“I feel like being an Outstanding Senior was a good capstone for my time at Purdue,” Hayes said. “The people in HHS invested in me, and I feel like I invested back into the program while I was there. To be recognized for that before I left is something I get to carry with me always. I’m always the Outstanding Senior of the year from my time when I was at Purdue.”

Hayes’ route to the health care industry can be attributed to her junior year at Purdue. Her father had a medical crisis in which he was diagnosed with congestive heart failure and a tumor on his left kidney. During that time, Hayes was shadowing clinical professor Pamela Karagory in the School of Nursing as part of her involvement on the committee that determined nominees for the Charles B. Murphy Outstanding Undergraduate Teaching Award. The experience ultimately gave her an opportunity to merge her hospitality acumen with the health care realm.

“I was having this experience of seeing my dad in the hospital and interviewing Professor Karagory in nursing, and I’m a hospitality student,” Hayes said. “I lamented to Professor Karagory about how I spent all day in classes about how amazing service excellence is, how we need to give great care to people and how everyone deserves hospitality. Then, I drive down to the hospital where my dad is in his really serious condition, and he’s not receiving that care. How do we justify that? How do we live with that? Professor Karagory recommended I do undergraduate research with her in nursing as a hospitality student.”

For Hayes, the most rewarding part of being a hospitality professional in a health care setting is the unique angle it offers in bringing exceptional experiences to the people who need them most.

“I love that I get to do hospitality in a way that has a different impact,” Hayes said. “It’s great to be able to provide great service to someone when they pay for it. It means something very different when there’s vulnerable populations that should receive service regardless of what they can provide to us. I think that is what makes it meaningful to me and what I like most about it. I get to bring my industry into a space that needs it. It changes the dynamics of the customer-business relationship.”

Hayes was recently honored with a 2025 Values Leadership Award from IU Health for her distinguished leadership — one of the highest honors the hospital system awards.

“I indirectly lead every director and manager in the region, so to have a distinguished leader award for someone who indirectly leads, I feel like is a really big deal,” Hayes said.

Hayes noted while she sees herself surrounded with life-saving physicians, nurses and medical staff every day, she sees herself in hospitality first and foremost, which has been an asset in her role.

“I will always be a hospitality professional,” Hayes said. “That’s who I am at my core. I think the program has shaped me in that way.”

As Hayes continues to take giant leaps at IU Health and beyond, she remains grateful for Purdue in helping set her up for that success.

“I feel like I got to do everything in a very safe space, and it made me very good at it by the time I entered industry, and people noticed that I was ahead of others because of the experience that I got at Purdue, and I have been rewarded for that,” Hayes said.