Design Specialist, Ariadne Labs

Ariadne Labs is a joint center for health systems innovation at Brigham and Women's Hospital and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Our goal is to save lives and reduce suffering by developing and implementing solutions for better care at critical moments in people’s lives everywhere. Better care means better health outcomes, lower costs, and more actual caring. Critical means solving health systems failures that have major impact, typically touching people by the millions.

Ariadne Labs currently has research and implementation projects in the areas of childbirth, surgery, palliative care, home hospital, and primary health care.

Ariadne Labs’ platform teams support projects by providing expertise in the fields of informatics, statistics, implementation science, monitoring and evaluation, quality improvement, strategic communications, human centered design and program management.

The Ariadne Labs’ Innovation Platform accelerates programs’ ability to successfully design, test, and spread solutions. Our design work begins with precisely identifying the problem and patient outcomes to change, background research, generating solution options and prototyping, collecting rapid-cycle feedback, and then iterating on solution design and implementation elements.

The Design Specialist will be part of the Innovation Platform at Ariadne Labs to provide support in designing effective improvement solutions in accordance with project goals, to meet the needs of end users. The Innovation Platform includes a Director, Platform Coordinator, and Innovation/Design consultants.

The Design Specialist is a hybrid role requiring at least two days a week in our offices at Assembly Row in Somerville, Massachusetts and will report to the Director of Innovation and work closely with staff and faculty across the Lab.

The Design Specialist’s anticipated portfolio will include collaboration with Ariadne Labs’ Home Hospital Program-a team leading work focused on advancing hospital-level care to patients at home, particularly in rural and underserved areas. Key current initiatives include the DEMOCRATIZE (Driving Equitable Medical Care in Rural America Through Innovative Vehicl

ZE) project, which is developing and implementing mobile hubs-specialty vans that deliver acute and oncology care directly into rural communities. The Specialist will work alongside this diverse team of clinicians, engineers, implementation specialists, and researchers to help design and deliver the next generation of accessible, patient-centered healthcare.

• Integrate principles of innovation, design thinking, human factors engineering, product development, and systems design into project work.
• Contribute to small, innovative projects as well as for large-scale projects seeking to develop scalable solutions to complex health system problems.
• Lead the design, facilitation, and synthesis of workshops for brainstorming, workflow and journey mapping, user profiling, etc.
• Co-lead with project teams community outreach and engagement efforts
• Support internal teams and external collaborators to connect to end-users’ pains and gains as well as facilitators and barriers to systems changes.
• Drive teams to simplify concepts and ideas, drive clarity, develop insights and always keep the goal and end-users in mind
• Produce early versions and revisions of tools to be used in rapid cycle testing with end users
• Guide teams in executing frontline interviews and/or prototype testing
• Provide creative services to help visualize ideas to drive clarity and understanding in early stages of ideas
• Develop and produce final versions of tools to be used in formal testing (tools may be paper based, web based, or integrated into existing systems in the healthcare setting)
• Add to the catalog of innovation, design, and product management approaches, activities and methodologies that will lead future direction of Ariadne Labs work.
• Serve as an innovation and design content expert for the Lab by conducting lab-wide learning sessions and lectures
• Other duties as assigned

• BA required
• Masters preferred in related field (MBA, MPH, other)
• 5+ years…