Uzma Amin (HCM)

Career goal:

Healthcare Experience/Service Design

Internship outline:

I worked at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) as a healthcare experience design intern within the Center for Excellence in Primary Care (CEPC), a primary care think-tank. I was located at the Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital (ZSFG) campus and worked with their Sleep Care Team and various external stakeholders to redesign the care experience for obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) patients and improve treatment adherence for a safety-net patient population using human-centered design principles.

Value of experience:

Working as a human-centered designer at UCSF was a dream! It’s not common for health systems to have designers on their team, and it was refreshing and empowering to be so welcomed and trusted by the UCSF team. I was able to scope out my own workflow and had lots of autonomy and opportunities to present my work, and my colleagues were open to getting a little silly by drawing and role playing at our design sessions. Not only did this internship experience give me valuable experience in facilitating a design project at a major health system, but I also hope it set a precedent to incorporate design research methods to solve healthcare problems.

Best moment/experience:

The best moment was definitely the final design sprint where the team came up with solutions to the design challenge of improving the care experience for sleep apnea patients. I had done months of research with patients and providers, and it was so rewarding seeing all the pieces of data come together as insights that fueled our ideation session. Human-centered design was a different way of thinking for the team I was leading and seeing providers and public health researchers really excited about the session and thinking like designers was a huge moment for me.

Funding source:

InnovateHealth Yale Summer Internship Grant