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Imagine being the service design lead of a healthcare network of 88,000 patients. Your team consists of five people. Sounds daunting, doesn’t it? This is the work that Carol Massa does every day at Northwell Health, New York’s largest healthcare network. She brings her wisdom and experience not only to this episode of the Rosenfeld Review, but to the inaugural Advancing Service Design Conference on December 3-4, 2024.

Starting as a design student at SCAD, Carol’s career path has taken her to management consulting and now to her pivotal position at Northwell’s Enterprise Digital Service division.

Carol discusses her team’s unique approach to service design, acting as translators of human insights for digital services. Her team’s work involves transforming research and data into actionable insights, creating playbooks, and facilitating collaboration across various departments. The focus is on enhancing patient and clinician experiences by streamlining administrative tasks through innovative digital tools.

Throughout the conversation, Carol highlights the importance of building relationships and humanizing interactions. She shares insights on using familiar frameworks to engage clinicians and bridge gaps in communication, ensuring that all stakeholders understand the shared goals of improving patient care.

What You’ll Learn from this Episode:

• The Role of Service Design in Healthcare: Understanding how service design can improve patient and clinician experiences within large healthcare systems like Northwell Health
• Collaboration Across Disciplines: How a small service design team collaborates with various departments and stakeholders, including clinicians, engineers, and business strategists, to enhance service delivery
• Translating Insights into Action: Techniques for translating complex data and human insights into actionable strategies and digital tools that address specific needs
• Humanizing Interactions: The importance of building personal relationships and fostering open communication to bridge gaps
• Prototyping and Testing Ideas: How rapid prototyping and testing can be used to validate ideas and improve processes, ensuring that new tools and services effectively meet user needs.
• Adapting Existing Frameworks: Creative approaches to leveraging existing frameworks (like problems, goals, and tasks) in a way that resonates with different audiences, particularly in translating technical language for clinicians.

Quick Reference Guide:
0:00 – Meet Carol
2:02 – Service design at Northwell
7:25 – The makeup of the service design team
9:49 – The operational tools and documentation the team uses
13:46 – An example of incorporating and automating a new operational process
17:36 – Why you need the Rosenverse
20:04 – Action-driven problems, goals, and tasks
24:35 – Breaking into established systems
29:02 – Carol’s gift for listeners