Building a Non-Traditional Team, Expanding Innovative Partnerships
Designers, product managers, and data scientists were not among the job descriptions you might have found five years ago at the University of California San Francisco (UCSF). But then, the Center for Digital Health Innovation (CDHI) at UCSF isn’t conventional – after all, they color outside the lines to find creative digital solutions to transform healthcare.
“We have a team comprising a lot people who either have significant experience outside of healthcare, or who have skill sets you don’t typically find at healthcare systems,” said Aaron Neinstein, MD, Vice President of Digital Health at UCSF Health, and Senior Director at CDHI. “For instance, we hired the healthcare practice lead at Frog Design to build our design team, former chief data scientist at Intel to lead our data science team, and our product management leader led the launch One Medical Enhanced Primary Care at Google campuses, just to name a few of our diverse team of talents.”
CDHI has long been a trailblazer. Founded in 2012, it was one of the first digital health innovation centers in the country. The team grew slowly in its early years, while digital health was still in its infancy, focused on testing and developing several products like CareWeb (licensed to Voalte as Voalte Story) and the Critical Care X-Ray Suite (co-developed with GE).
The team started to grow in 2018 with a more intense focus on the patient experience and virtual care. It began building the teams, foundational capabilities, and skills it saw as needed for digital transformation of UCSF and moving toward digital-first care delivery. As the pandemic catapulted digital health to a central focal point in healthcare, CDHI’s teams have rapidly scaled to support those needs. Currently, the CDHI team is growing with open positions in many areas.
As CDHI continues to grow capabilities like design, product management, architecture, and data science, it is also driving UCSF to organize cross-functional teams centered on elements of the patient experience, organizing “around the work” instead of the traditional way of organizing “work around the teams.”
“This is about changing the way we deliver care and transforming our core business operations,” said Dr. Neinstein. “Historically, innovation sits far outside of core operations and care delivery. Over the last year, we have more tightly integrated the teams to innovate and iterate in day-to-day operations.”
What does this mean? CDHI’s designers and product managers work with business leaders across UCSF to rethink and redesign workflows, focused on key elements of patients’ interactions with UCSF.
“This work is not a small pilot,” said Dr. Neinstein. “This is a huge part of our institutional strategy, an effort to completely rethink how we deliver core pieces of our care journey, and how it impacts patient experience.” CDHI’s current three areas of focus are: the experience of a person newly referred to UCSF, creating continuous, personalized care for people with complex conditions, and creating better communications and engagement with patients throughout their care journey.
Partnering With Leaders Across UCSF
One such collaboration is CDHI’s long-standing relationship with Debbie Gee, Executive Director at the UCSF Orthopaedic Institute. The Patient Access Suite was developed through close partnership and iterative product releases with the Orthopaedic Institute, and has been successfully improving referral scheduling for patients and staff for more than two years. The suite is also live in UCSF’s Pediatric Access Center and Cancer Access Center.
Last year the team also worked with UCSF Pulmonologist Steven Hays, MD, Director of UCSF’s Lung Transplant Program. As transplant centers were forced to close due to the pandemic, UCSF pivoted to meet the needs of immunosuppressed post-transplant patients by creating a program using home spirometry kits and a digital chatbot to stay connected and identify issues.
CDHI also brings in external expertise by partnering with consultancies with digital expertise, as well as technology companies, such as Philips and Conversa Health.
A Partnership and Affiliate-Driven Approach
“We don’t plan to build everything ourselves,” said Dr. Neinstein. “We will work closely with partners who have complementary expertise, including technology and digital care delivery companies.” He added, “We think the future of healthcare is much more networked, with a patient having much more choice and opportunity to move their care and their data throughout the healthcare system, so our technologies must be similarly flexible.”
One example is CDHI’s recent partnership with Royal Philips, which has a storied history in healthcare, and is heavily investing in a digital healthcare future. Through the partnership, patients can have a modern, more streamlined experience. CDHI will leverage Philips HealthSuite Platform to power artificial intelligence that enables greater personalization and makes it easier for patients to select doctors, access their health information, and receive virtual care at home.
CDHI also partners with digital health companies such as Luma Health, incorporating their text messaging as part of its Patient Access Suite to enable patients to communicate easier with referral coordinators, and with Conversa Health, using its conversational chat along with a home spirometry kit to care for post-transplant patients.
Join Us
Do you want to join a team that has impact on redesigning and improving how patients get healthcare every single day? If so, we’re HIRING! We’re looking for creative, compassionate people to join us at UCSF’s CDHI. Check out our open roles and apply.