How and Why HHPartners Came to Be and Our History of Developing Healthcare Hospitality
- Aug 10
- 6 min read
Tom McNulty, M.S., is a healthcare consultant with a vast array of experiences in behavioral health, neurology, healthcare hospitality, and health talk podcasting-"MindSet with Tom McNulty, M.S." He is a professional photographer, screenwriter, and public speaker.
In 2014, one of our partners, Tom McNulty, Master of Science (M.S.), president of Success Stories, Inc., a healthcare consulting firm created in 1990, was noticing an increase in disgruntled patients, families, employees, physicians, and referral sources. At the time, Tom was also teaching graduate students in the nursing management track and undergraduate students majoring in the healthcare field at D'Youville University. His dean at D’Youville took a position at Hilbert College, and he asked Tom to join him. Tom joined the faculty involved in the healthcare track in the Master’s in Public Administration (MPA) division.
While at Hilbert College, Tom taught many classes on marketing, grant writing, and not-for-profit financial management. During his teaching, Tom would routinely ask students to share the good and bad of their last healthcare encounter, be it their own experience or as they accompanied a family member. Sadly, most chose their bad experiences, and the stories were appalling. He’d ask the students, “What experience should you have had?” The answers pointed to a repeated lack of basic hospitality that led to poor outcomes, lawsuits, and a decision to go elsewhere in the future. That’s when his ideas about healthcare hospitality started to percolate.
Tom contacted Peter Hertsgaard, Master of Fine Arts (M.F.A.), a dear friend and co-creator of The Episodes Project. Peter is an accomplished writer, actor, director, and producer, and the two were very comfortable with each other’s creative energy. Peter has developed a successful company, Invizion, that utilizes “interactive learning” through the presentation of “interactive theater” to Fortune 100 companies coast to coast. Tom believed Peter’s skills and experience would be a perfect fit for a consulting project Tom was envisioning to creatively infuse healthcare hospitality into progressive-thinking health and medical organizations. Being at Hilbert College, Tom brought the dean into the discussion and introduced Peter to see if we could get Hilbert College to host an “interactive theater” presentation, develop a panel of local experts, and invite a full auditorium of interested parties. They did exactly that, to an audience of 150 individuals from a multitude of diverse healthcare providers and managed care organizations. The showcase was a tremendous validation of the need for formal healthcare hospitality training and educational offerings.
In 2015, Tom and Peter connected with a fellow consultant in Nashville and planned a similar “interactive theater” showcase for Vanderbilt University’s Medical School administration and senior faculty. Once again, the response was very encouraging. This led to the idea of bringing healthcare hospitality “interactive learning” to medical schools and also to developing a formal Master’s program at Hilbert College. We engaged the CEO of the Health Foundation of Western and Central New York with an initial grant request of $500,000. Internal discussions were gaining genuine interest but were thwarted as the college was in financial distress, and our dean took a big promotion at Gannon University in Erie, Pennsylvania. Without the dean’s support, Tom and Peter decided to put advancing the project on indefinite hold.
Hope springs eternal. In early 2022, Tom reconnected with several friends, colleagues, and former co-workers who were living in different parts of the United States. While chatting and catching up, Tom mentioned to them that he and Peter had developed an “interactive theater” play about healthcare hospitality. They were intrigued and interested in learning more.
After two years of COVID-19 and its variants, healthcare organizations were hurting in every way. While heroic work was being done daily, death was omnipresent, and medical and support staff were physically and emotionally burning out. Service was strained, quality was slipping, staff were quitting, wearing a mask became political, and patients were dying every single hour of every shift. The emotional toll was enormous, but was often put “on hold” to take care of the next influx of patients. Could healthcare hospitality be part of an effective turnaround strategy? The resounding answer was yes!
Welcome, Zoom! Using Zoom, one by one, we brought together potential partners with unique yet critical skills to build the best healthcare hospitality program in the country. The program is proprietary and copyright-protected.
Tom recruited the partners, and Peter brought Connie Schoyer, Ph.D. (Baltimore, Maryland), an organizational psychologist, to a Zoom meeting. Connie and Peter had worked together for years through Invizion and Connie’s connections at Korn Ferry. They had the “interactive theater” and facilitation experience they effectively used with major corporations, Fortune 100 and 500 companies, including healthcare. The beginnings of an impressive group of complementary partners were coming together.
Tom McNulty, M.S., has known Nancy Sheehan, R.N., J.D., for 25+ years. They worked together at BryLin Hospitals, a private psychiatric hospital in Buffalo, New York. Tom was Vice President of Marketing, and Nancy, after many years as a nurse, became a healthcare attorney and was BryLin’s in-house Chief Legal Counsel. She moved on in the same capacity to the large Catholic Health System until she retired in 2022. She was there for 20+ years. Tom introduced Nancy to the growing team, and Nancy accepted an offer to join our partnership in 2022.
Dr. Cynthia Ambres (Los Angeles, California) is an entrepreneurial physician and forever friend of Tom’s. While they live in opposite parts of the country, they’ve stayed in touch and exchanged “chats” on various social media sites. Dr. Ambres has witnessed the benefits of “interactive theater” and knows of Peter and Connie’s success with creative solutions to complex situations. For a time, Dr. Ambres lived in Buffalo and held C-level positions in managed care and hospital administration. After several phone calls about our project and an introduction to the team, Dr. Ambres joined the team in March 2023 as Medical Advisor.
With a full team in place, the partners began crafting the healthcare hospitality structure and the “pain points” healthcare organizations are facing. Tom and Peter examined the 2025 and 2026 priorities of the American Medical Association (AMA) and the American Hospital Association (AHA) and found a lot of common ground where healthcare hospitality could make a significant impact that would endure without heavy lifting for staff. With a strong cast of partners in place, we aligned our skill sets with areas of need identified by AMA and AHA, plus the daily healthcare headlines that can arise without warning. From a point of expertise and skills, we focused on our strengths, including behavioral health, organizational behavior, legal issues and lawsuit prevention, practical and targeted marketing, finance, managed care, recruitment and retention, sales, emotional intelligence, data collection and interpretation, communication, artificial intelligence (AI), and administrative leadership, including staff and team active participation.
Hospitality is not a new concept, but in healthcare it can be defined differently based on how its components are perceived. For instance, some hospital executives viewed valet parking, a gift shop, a coffee café, and even a McDonald’s as a genuine hospitality offering. We do not.
The goal of healthcare hospitality is to create a culture that is on autopilot and becomes inculcated in the mindset of everyone from the board of directors to all employees at every level, everyone takes personal ownership of practicing the mantra daily, thus new employees enter a culture of hospitality and quickly get oriented to the expectations. There are no binders to read, classes to attend, videos to watch, or those “flavor of the week” management mandates like Total Quality Management (TQM), Six Sigma, 360 Evaluations, and dozens of forgettable Leadership Training programs. HHPartners’ focus is on inclusion, active listening, de-escalation techniques, emotional intelligence, creating team champions, new recruitment strategies, facility appearance, and critical communication. Compassion for patients, families, and each other is a given, it’s inside of all of us. Just imagine how many lawsuits could be averted with meaningful communication.
When a hospital CEO seems hesitant to move forward, we often ask these questions:
What happens to your organization if you do not embrace healthcare hospitality?
What is the current perception of your hospital amongst providers, managed care, and the general population?
Did you know that avoiding just one lawsuit could probably pay for HHPartners’ services?
Are doctors and nurses likely to leave a hospital that is full of positive energy?
Is generational loyalty important to your organization?
How was your last healthcare experience? Interested in learning more? Please contact Tom McNulty, M.S., here.
Read more from Thomas Patrick McNulty
Thomas Patrick McNulty, CEO of Success Stories, Inc.
Tom McNulty, M.S., developed his interest in psychology and the brain in high school while attending college at the same time. His interests grew, and he received his master's degree. After graduation, he worked in a psychiatric hospital as a family therapist, and then he was offered a management position to work with troubled adolescents. Tom took his passion to the airwaves and hosted a weekly health talk radio program for 18 years. He is the founding partner of HHPartners (healthcare hospitality consulting) and co-creator of The Episodes Project (behavioral health). His mission: "Creating Enduring Impact".
