Qualtrics has completed its $6.75BN acquisition of Press Ganey Forsta, bringing one of healthcare’s largest experience datasets into its AI-powered Experience Management (XM) platform.
The deal, first announced in October 2025, marks one of the largest consolidation moves in the XM market and significantly expands Qualtrics’ position in healthcare. It combines the Qualtrics platform with Press Ganey Forsta’s healthcare experience and benchmarking datasets benchmarking, and Voice of the Customer capabilities.
According to Qualtrics, the acquisition adds “the world’s largest healthcare experience dataset” to its XM AI and data platform, with more than 41,000 healthcare facilities using Press Ganey Forsta systems, including the majority of U.S. hospitals.
The company says the combination will help organizations move beyond retrospective experience measurement and toward predictive, real-time interventions powered by AI.
Qualtrics Expands Its Healthcare XM Footprint
Press Ganey is best known for patient, member, employee, and clinician experience measurement across the healthcare sector, while Forsta brought broader VoC, market research, and customer insights capabilities following its earlier combination with Press Ganey.
For Qualtrics, the acquisition strengthens its ability to serve healthcare organizations with industry-specific benchmarks, experience data, and AI-driven insights at scale.
The company positioned the deal as a response to rising consumer expectations in healthcare, driven in part by AI-enabled personalization across other industries.
Qualtrics argues that healthcare organizations are no longer being judged only against local health providers, but against the experience standards set by digital leaders in sectors such as hospitality, travel, and retail.
Patients now come into healthcare systems “informed, researched, empowered, anxious, and expectation-hungry with an AI doctor in their pocket,” explained Jason Maynard, CEO of Qualtrics, adding:
“AI permanently changed what people expect from every experience in their lives.”
According to Maynard, competitive differentiation increasingly lies in the “experience gap,” the difference between what customers expect and what organizations are able to deliver. “The Qualtrics proprietary XM AI and data platform provides the human understanding and contextual inference that large language models alone lack. This transforms proprietary experiential signals into trusted, outcome-driven experiences.”
Maynard added that the combined datasets and contextual intelligence capabilities from the two companies “raises the standard for what experience management can do across every industry we serve.”
From Retrospective Measurement to Predictive Experience Intelligence
The acquisition comes as experience management vendors race to make customer, employee, and patient signals more actionable through AI.
Traditional VoC programs have often focused on collecting feedback and reporting scores after an interaction has taken place. Qualtrics is positioning the combined platform as a way to turn those signals into predictive intelligence that can shape decisions in real time.
According to Qualtrics, integrating Press Ganey Forsta’s patient experience data with its XM platform will enable organizations to move from retrospective measurement toward AI-powered interventions.
The company said:
“This dataset creates the engine for a new generation of AI-driven synthetic experience intelligence systems capable of simulating outcomes, predicting human needs and behaviors, and orchestrating more personalized experiences.”
Qualtrics appears to be positioning the combined platform as a way for organizations to model customer or patient journeys, forecast potential pain points and trigger interventions before dissatisfaction shows up in traditional survey results.
Maynard described experience management as a critical layer for AI systems seeking to deliver more human-centric outcomes: “Experience management gives AI the human context it needs to understand not simply what happened, but why it happened, how it felt, and what should happen next.”
Maynard also indicated that organizations are entering a period where operational data alone will not be enough to compete:
“Companies already know what customers clicked, bought, or canceled. What they need now is the ability to understand intent, emotion, friction, trust, and confidence in real time.”
Healthcare is a particularly attractive market for this shift because patient experience is increasingly tied to operational performance, reputation, retention, reimbursement models, and workforce engagement.
Providers are also under pressure to meet consumer-grade expectations while managing staffing shortages, rising costs, and strict data governance requirements.
As AI becomes more embedded in healthcare experience workflows, providers will also need to balance personalization with privacy, transparency, data governance and clinical trust.
That balance could become increasingly important as vendors move from analyzing feedback to recommending actions, predicting needs and orchestrating interventions across patient and employee journeys.
Beyond Healthcare: Qualtrics Targets Broader Enterprise XM Use Cases
While healthcare is central to the acquisition, Qualtrics also emphasized that customers in other industries could benefit from access to broader datasets and more precise AI models in the expanded platform.
“For Qualtrics customers in financial services, public sector, technology, retail, hospitality, and beyond, this means a more powerful platform — more data, more context, and more precise AI — in service of the same outcomes they rely on Qualtrics to deliver today.”
The move also strengthens Qualtrics’ position against other enterprise software vendors seeking to own the AI-powered customer intelligence layer. CRM, contact center, analytics, and service management providers are all expanding their ability to ingest customer signals, infer sentiment and intent, and recommend next-best actions.
In that environment, proprietary datasets and industry-specific benchmarks are becoming as important as workflow automation and generative AI features.
Industry analysts view the acquisition as part of a wider trend toward combining operational and experiential data to support AI-driven decision-making.
Keith Kirkpatrick, VP and Research Director with The Futurum Group, explained:
“By combining healthcare-specific benchmarking and provider data with its XM platform, healthcare organizations will be well positioned to transition from relying solely on retrospective insights to leveraging real-time, outcome-oriented actions that improve both patient and provider experiences.”
That shift from measurement to action has become a central theme in the XM market as enterprises look for clearer links between experience programs, loyalty, retention, employee engagement, and financial outcomes.
