PCC’s Chip Hart recalls a story he heard from a pediatrician who, like many others, told him that she valued compassion in her practice’s culture. To her, this meant that she would accept anyone who arrived at her practice doors. When one day she heard her front desk staff informing a late patient that they would have to reschedule, she was upset that the employee was not following the practice’s stated culture of compassion.
The front desk person replied that they were following culture: They were showing compassion for patients with appointments after the late arrivals. The doctor realized their employee was right, and gained a new, in-depth understanding of her own practice culture, as well as a look at how compassion is lived, not just as an ideal. “That, to me, was a really great example of what happens when you have a strong culture,” Chip says.
A pediatric practice’s culture is more than its atmosphere, employee perks, or a mission statement hanging on the wall. Culture is the set of expectations, behaviors, and experiences that shape how a practice operates — for both patients and staff.
For practice leaders, that means culture doesn't just happen. Leaders can intentionally shape their practice culture by defining what they value, communicating those expectations clearly, and consistently reinforcing them through their own behavior and decisions. But making that promise is only the beginning. The real work is making sure the culture you describe is the culture that your team and your patients actually experience.
We asked two leaders at PCC for their advice on how pediatric practices can drive culture in real, actionable ways. Erin Auer and Chip Hart share their perspectives, drawn from their experience supporting and consulting with hundreds of pediatric practices to hone their mission, vision, and values.
What Does “Practice Culture” Really Mean?
“Culture” can sometimes feel like a business buzzword. In a pediatric practice, however, culture is visible in very concrete ways.
Culture shows up in how staff members interact with one another, how the practice communicates with families, and how leaders respond when something goes wrong. It can be seen in which behaviors are encouraged, tolerated, or discouraged — and in whether employees feel comfortable speaking up when they have a concern or see an opportunity for improvement.
In other words, culture is the promise and expectations a practice communicates and then acts upon. “Step one is being honest with yourself,” Erin says.
If a practice values compassion, teamwork, or patient-centered care, those values should be recognizable in the way the practice actually operates. They should shape the employee experience as well as the experience families have when they call, schedule an appointment, walk through the door, interact with the care team, and follow up after a visit.
Start With a Clear Mission and Shared Values
A strong practice culture begins with clarity about what the practice stands for. A mission statement gives a practice a clear way to articulate the population it serves, the services it hopes to provide, its core beliefs, and the experience it wants patients, families, and employees to have. Shared values can provide the behavioral framework underneath that mission.
What is important to remember is that a mission statement cannot create culture by itself. There's a difference between having a stated culture and actually living that culture. As Erin explains, a mission can become “a poster and not a lifestyle” if an organization doesn't reinforce it through its behavior.
For practice leaders, that means asking questions such as:
- Do leaders model the values they describe?
- Do employees understand what those values look like in practice?
- Are important decisions consistent with the stated mission?
- Do patients actually experience what the practice promises?
A clearly communicated mission can also help prospective patients and employees understand whether a practice's approach aligns with what they're looking for.
Examples From Pediatric Practices
Many pediatric practices communicate their culture through their web presence. The pediatric practices below connect their culture to mission statements that tell families exactly what to expect before they ever enter the parking lot.
North Augusta Pediatrics
North Augusta Pediatrics in North Augusta, South Carolina, puts its priorities front and center, describing itself as a practice “where children come first.” Their mission language, available on the home page of their website, emphasizes collaboration, compassion, comprehensive care, accessibility, and helping families feel confident in their care decisions.
Treasure Valley Children’s Clinic
Treasure Valley Children’s Clinic in Meridian, Idaho, begins with a similarly direct mission statement on their “Our Practice” webpage: “We exist to help every child live the most fulfilling life possible.”
Treasure Valley describes their vision of building a community where children and families can flourish, while emphasizing care tailored to the needs of individual families. The mission statement also explicitly describes the desired relationship with families as one based on “trust, compassion, and mutual respect.”
Hirsch Pediatrics
Hirsch Pediatrics in Rockville, Maryland, takes another approach. Its mission is framed around a specific vision for the experience of care: “an outstanding level of pediatric care in a small, family-centered, efficient, and relaxed environment.” It emphasizes relationships, a gentle and nurturing environment, and the idea that visiting the pediatrician should relieve stress rather than increase it.
Each of these practices communicates culture somewhat differently. But they share an important characteristic: They give patients and families a clear idea of what the practice believes and what they can expect from the relationship, whether that’s clear communication, a respectful collaboration, or a nurturing environment.
Culture Is Defined by Behavior
Culture isn't just what leaders say. It's what people do. As Erin puts it, “It’s not just what you say, it’s what you allow, or what you avoid dealing with.”
Leaders communicate culture through what they pay attention to, what they praise, what they correct, what they tolerate, and what they prioritize when time or resources are limited. Over time, the behaviors that consistently receive reinforcement become part of the practice's culture.
A useful question for practice leaders is: “What behaviors do we consistently reward, reinforce, and allow?” The answer may reveal a difference between the culture a practice says it wants and the culture it is actually creating.
For example, a practice might say that teamwork is important while consistently rewarding individual performance at the expense of collaboration. Or, it might describe itself as committed to learning and improvement while responding to mistakes primarily through blame. When the stated value and the reinforced behavior send two different messages, employees will ultimately learn which one is real.
Leaders Set the Tone
Culture begins with leadership, but it is experienced throughout the organization.
Leaders don't have to personally control every aspect of their practice's culture. They do, however, need to establish expectations and model them consistently.
If respect is a stated value, leaders need to demonstrate respect during difficult conversations. If teamwork is important, leaders need to avoid creating silos or rewarding behavior that undermines the team. If learning and improvement are valued, mistakes should create opportunities for discussion and improvement rather than simply blame.
This doesn't require grand gestures or an annual culture initiative. Culture is built through repeated, ordinary interactions. Every conversation, decision, correction, and response to a problem is an opportunity to reinforce the practice's values. Just like the pediatrician from Chip’s example earlier, the chance to live culture in real life and with different interpretations can lend new understanding and depth to what your culture really is.
Good culture gives employees the clarity and safety to exercise their own judgement when following the practice’s values. Meanwhile, good leaders are willing to recognize when an employee’s interpretation is valid, and can take the opportunity to grow their own perspectives. Ultimately, this leads to a stronger culture where teams and individuals are empowered to act in service of shared values.
Culture can grow organically when it’s tested by multiple perspectives. To allow this to happen, your culture needs to be one in which employees’ voices are heard.
Create Psychological Safety for Employees to Speak Up
A healthy practice culture should give employees opportunities to raise concerns, suggest improvements, and identify problems.
“If you create a culture where people don’t feel safe to speak up when they see something that doesn’t match, it ends up hurting everyone,” Erin says.
Staff members need to understand that speaking up is part of contributing to the practice, not a threat to their reputation or role. Leaders can reinforce that expectation by:
- Listening without becoming defensive.
- Asking employees for their ideas.
- Following up on concerns.
- Acknowledging when something needs to change.
- Giving employees appropriate ownership over solutions.
This is particularly important in pediatric practices, where a variety of people address different parts of the patient experience. Front desk staff, nurses, billers, physicians, and other team members may each notice problems or opportunities that aren't visible to other roles. A culture that encourages people to speak up allows the practice to make better use of that collective knowledge.
Make Culture Visible in the Patient Experience
Patients and families experience a practice's culture whether or not they ever read its mission statement. This is because culture appears in the details of everyday care: scheduling, check-in, check-out, phone communication, the waiting-room experience, provider interactions, follow-up, and communication during stressful situations.
The values a practice communicates should ultimately be recognizable in those interactions.
This is also where the mission statements of practices like North Augusta Pediatrics, Treasure Valley Children’s Clinic, and Hirsch Pediatrics become useful examples. Each practice makes promises about the experience families can expect. The important question is what those promises look like when translated into daily operations.
If a practice promises convenience and accessibility, what does that mean for scheduling? If it promises partnership and mutual respect, how does the team communicate with families? If it promises a gentle, nurturing, low-stress environment, what does that look like when a child is sick, a parent is worried, or the pediatrician is running behind?
The goal isn't simply to state your mission in a way that you hope will attract families to your practice. It's to ensure that the experience a practice promises is one it can consistently deliver. A practice’s values become most meaningful when they provide a framework for everyday decisions, not just a description of what the practice hopes to be. For example, PCC’s culture stems from our values in how we operate as a software and services company.
From Mission Statement to Daily Practice
Practice leaders don't have to transform every aspect of their culture at once. A useful first step may simply be identifying the culture they have today and deciding what they want to reinforce going forward.
Consider these questions:
- What do we want patients and families to say about their experience with us?
- What do we want employees to say about working here?
- What behaviors demonstrate our stated values?
- Which behaviors are currently inconsistent with those values?
- What do our leaders model every day?
- Do employees feel comfortable speaking up when something isn't working?
- Where does our actual practice culture differ from our stated culture?
These questions can help move culture from an abstract concept into something practice leaders and teams can observe, discuss, and improve.
Want to explore your practice’s values in-depth?
PCC has resources to help pediatric practices put the ideas in this post into action. At the 2025 PCC Users’ Conference, Chip was joined by Dr. Brian Birch of Treasure Valley Children’s Clinic to present the “Practice Values Workshop,” a hands-on session focused on identifying and articulating the values that guide a practice’s culture.
Check out PCC Learn for the full set of materials, including the video recording of Chip and Dr. Birch’s talk and workbook materials to help you get started.
Culture Is Something You Do
Your practice’s culture isn't a document, slogan, or team-building exercise. Culture is created through repeated behaviors, decisions, interactions, and expectations. Those expectations are reinforced by leaders willing to own the values they lead by. These values inform everything your practice does, from organizing benefits to hiring new employees.
As Chip puts it, a good culture relies on a team that has the same goals: “I would rather hire for brains and alignment than for experience — every day of the week.”
For Erin, the value of culture is ultimately about putting ideas into practice. She gives the annual PCC’s Users’ Conference as an example: “My favorite thing about the Users’ Conference is not that we talk about culture. It’s that we live it. It's that we spend three days walking around being the PCC culture and doing what we are: living our mission.”
The annual Users’ Conference is a fantastic resource for pediatric practices seeking to improve their workflows, culture, billing, and more. Users’ Conference materials are open for all to access, whether or not you’re a PCC client.
To learn more about engaging in culture at your practice, check out these presentations from the 2024 Users’ Conference: Do You Work with the Wrong People?, presented by Chip; The Happiness League: Supercharging Employee Joy & Fulfillment in the Pediatric Office presented by Dr. Katie Schafer; and Building a Practice Where People Want To Work, a panel discussion between pediatricians and industry experts.
There are even more resources on building practice culture from the 2025 Users’ Conference too, including Dr. Birch and Chip’s Practice Values Workshop. Co-owners of Bloom Pediatrics, Dr. Katie Schafer and Dr. Anna Groebe present Brick by Brick: Building Practice Culture and Community Outreach with a LEGO Mindset, while PCC’s people experts offer insights into staff engagement with their Employee Engagement and Retention Workshop.
Click below to access all of these presentations along with their materials.
