Placement: Kaiser Permanente
Co-Mentors: Scott Young, M.D., Executive Director, Care Management Institute, Kaiser Permanente; Julie Vilardi, RN, MS, Clinical Quality and Safety Leader, Kaiser Permanente; and Estee Neuwirth, Ph.D., Senior Director, Kaiser Permanente Design Consultancy
Project: Integrating Human-Centered Design for Health Care System Culture Change: A Case Study of Kaiser Permanente
Ines Gravey, M.P.A., is a 2019–20 French Harkness Fellow in Health Care Policy and Practice. Gravey is a hospital director for the Paris University Hospitals (AP-HP) and an expert in hospital restructuring within the French Ministry of Health. She has led major recompositions among hospitals in northern Paris, and as director of human resources has built and tested plans to support health professionals during closings and mergers. Passionate about change management, professional engagement, and collaborative approaches, Gravey has drawn on her expertise in carrying out the reform of “hospital group territories” for the French Ministry of Health, ensuring that the human factors of these restructurings are taken into consideration. Gravey has implemented new approaches to public innovation and provided informed consultation on major health care reforms, including around the medical governance of hospitals. She co-founded Hospitalents, which brings together hundreds of health professionals from across all regions of France to address common challenges, develop design prototypes, and test new solutions in the country’s first hospital innovation community. This partnership between the Ministry of Health, the EHESP French School of Public Health, and the Performance Agency is the first program to introduce entrepreneurship in French hospitals. Gravey holds a Master's in Public Law (2009), passed the national examination of hospital directors (2011), and graduated from the French School of Public Health (2014).
Project Overview: Technological and medical advances, an aging population, and the increase in chronic disease are a tremendous challenge to health care systems. In the U.S., human-centered design, which means defining and solving problems using social science and design techniques, is now being applied in the health care sector. This research will focus on the awareness, adoption, and application of human-centered design among health care professionals, and the influence this has on leadership, health systems goals and objectives, and patient care. It will study how several programs, at Kaiser Permanente and elsewhere, employed human-centered design for such major health care issues as nurse shift change, medication safety, and mental health.
Using case studies, this study will examine how the following factors positively impact patient care and affect organizational culture: The integration of design expertise; the role of models such as centralized vs. distributed design expertise; stand-alone design and innovation labs versus integration of design into operations; and the development and spread of human-centered training and coaching programs for professionals. In addition, this research will seek to uncover additional factors for successful integration of human-centered design, as well as any limitations of this approach. Consideration will be given to the transferability of findings to different settings and scales as well as integration challenges, as this work aims to guide policymakers and health care leaders in the U.S. and France.
