Designing for Impact: Transforming Health Care Through Experience, Service, and Human Insight
What does it take to design healthcare experiences that truly reflect the needs of patients, families and care teams? Shelley Hoff and Caroline Franz of Risant Health explore how human-centered design, empathy and collaboration can help organizations create more compassionate, effective and intuitive experiences.
SHSMD Podcast | Published December 26, 2025
Designing for Impact: Transforming Health Care Through Experience, Service, and Human Insight
About the Episode
Human-centered design starts with understanding the lived experiences of the people a system is meant to serve. In this episode of the SHSMD Podcast, Shelley Hoff and Caroline Franz of Risant Health discuss how experience design, service design and human insights can help healthcare organizations rethink the patient and care team journey.
They explore how organizations can use empathy to uncover friction points, involve patients and staff in the design process, test solutions before scaling them and measure the impact of design through clinical, operational and experience metrics. They also discuss the role of emerging technologies, including AI and telehealth, and why technology should support rather than replace the human relationships at the center of care.
What You'll Hear
- How experience design and service design differ from traditional approaches to healthcare system design
- Why empathy and human insight are essential to identifying meaningful opportunities for improvement
- How patient and care team perspectives can reveal friction that operational data alone may miss
- Where AI, telehealth and other technologies can strengthen human-centered experiences, and where they can create new challenges
- Ways to measure the clinical, operational and experiential impact of design initiatives
- How to prototype, test, adapt and scale human-centered solutions across an organization
Featured Speakers
Shelley Hoff
Human Insights Lead, Risant Health
Caroline Franz
Service Design Lead, Risant Health
Caroline is an experienced design strategist, researcher and creator with a background in human-centered design and systems thinking. Her healthcare experience spans nearly 20 years and includes work with the University of Michigan, Kaiser Permanente and Risant Health. Her work focuses on understanding lived experiences and making services, products and environments more useful and effective.
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