Two longtime collaborators helping healthcare and senior living
organizations write what comes next.
Jill McCormick
Co-Founder & CEO
Christian Lagier
Co-Founder & President
For more than 12 years, we’ve worked side by side on one question: why do good ideas in healthcare so often stall before they reach the people they were meant for?
We were given an opportunity of a lifetime to start TechSpring, Baystate Health’s innovation center. There, we worked at the intersection of healthcare, technology, design and operations. Across 72 innovation projects, we watched a pattern repeat: a project would launch with fanfare, reach go-live, and stop at about 80%. Attention moved on, while nurses, doctors and other colleagues were left holding the workarounds.
We also saw what finishing the job looks like. With Praxify, a physician mobile app, we started by rounding with doctors and listening. They tested early prototypes, developers worked with them directly, and we kept measuring and improving long after launch. About 70% of Baystate physicians chose to use it. Praxify was later acquired by athenahealth and became the athenaOne mobile app.
We saw the same thing at the scale of a whole system. When we worked on access at Baystate Health, “book a visit” turned out to be the surface of a much bigger problem. Provider templates, referrals, booking rules, operational processes and the care model itself all shaped the experience. Access became a strategy for the organization, not simply another technology project.
“Before investing in new technology or more people, it makes sense to prove you can succeed with change, pick a Passionate Problem and do measurably better with what you already have.”
Later, in healthcare technology and consulting roles, we applied that same approach to broader strategy and transformation work: aligning leaders around the experience they wanted to create, designing ways of working that could sustain it, and connecting technology decisions to the people who would actually use them.
That taught us something else: designing the answer is only part of the work. Organizations have to succeed with change. People need to understand what is changing, help shape it, learn new ways of working and have a way to keep improving after the consultants leave.
Across this work, the pattern has stayed remarkably consistent. Start with the experience people should have. Understand the system that produces it. Design the operations and organization around it, including how you measure success. Then choose or adopt the technology that supports it.
That is the work we bring to Chapter 3.
Co-Founder & CEO
A scientist first, Jill brings disciplined curiosity to the seams where access, experience, operations and technology meet. Across more than 20 years spanning diagnostics, digital health, product leadership and healthcare innovation, she helps leaders untangle complex problems and design clearer, more human paths forward.
Co-Founder & President
Christian is happiest when an idea leaves the whiteboard. He puts prototypes in the hands of clinicians and care teams to learn what works in practice. Then he makes sure everything around it holds up, including measurement of success, so the technology supports the people doing the work, and they are on a path of ongoing improvement.