Chapter 3 is new.
The work behind it isn’t.

Some of the hardest experience problems aren’t really “experience” problems. They cross scheduling, operations, clinical workflows, technology and the way care itself is organized.

At Baystate Health, our prior work included a multiyear strategy for orchestrated access; Virtual Care and Digital Front Door product management; care-model roadmaps across primary and specialty care; ambulatory-capacity work; patient journey mapping; Emergency Department experience; and patient onboarding.

The common thread was looking beyond the visible touchpoint to understand and redesign the system producing the experience.

Technology works better when the experience and operating model come first.

Our prior work ranged from helping develop digital-front-door standards and remote-monitoring solutions to designing patient-engagement tools and technology supporting team-based care.

With Praxify, a physician mobile application developed at Baystate Health, the work started with clinicians: observing their work, testing prototypes with them and continuing to improve the product after launch.

Sometimes the challenge isn’t one project. It’s building an organization that can repeatedly turn good ideas into better workflows and better care.

That was central to TechSpring. The work included creating a place and a model for healthcare innovation, connecting clinicians with technology teams, teaching human-centered design, running innovation programs, and developing governance structures that helped ideas move into real-world use.

This year, Jill brought that thinking to work with Inova Health System as it strengthened the organizational capability needed to evaluate, govern and scale AI. Jill led design work supporting that effort.

Becker’s Hospital Review later documented where Inova’s model had evolved: more than 12 AI project reviews each month, 92 AI features in production, centralized governance and post-deployment monitoring, distributed implementation, specialized AI product-management and solution-design roles, and AI education for employees, clinicians and leaders.

A good design can still fail if the organization around it doesn’t change.

Across our work, we’ve helped teams involve the people closest to the work, test new approaches before scaling them, clarify decision-making and governance, build new capabilities and roles, and create ways to keep learning after launch.

At Baystate, that included a Design and Experience Review Board, governance for informatics and technology requests, human-centered design education and innovation programs. At Inova, the broader work addressed the organizational structures needed to make increasingly complex AI decisions at scale.

For us, succeeding with change means leaving behind more than a recommendation or just implementing a technology product. The people doing the work should understand it, help shape it and be able to keep making it better.

Human-centered design is also a way to learn.

In research on noninvasive ventilation, Jill McCormick and collaborators interviewed hospitalized patients with COPD and mapped their experience to understand what helped or hindered treatment tolerance.

The same principle runs through much of our work: spend time with the people living the problem, understand what is actually happening, and use what you learn to make the next version better.