The Digital Health Institute for Transformation (DHIT) team was delighted to be joined by a lively and engaged crowd of healthcare leaders, innovators, and disruptors for the March edition of our monthly Digital Health Happy Hour series at our home base, DHIT HQ, on historic Franklin Street in Chapel Hill, NC. The evening was sponsored by Bluedoor Group, a full-service healthcare marketing and growth agency working across the digital health ecosystem with start-ups, scale-ups, health systems, and enterprise to transform the way healthcare and technology are designed, delivered, and experienced. Programming began with some thoughtful conversation and networking over cold drinks and tasty bites before transitioning to our main event of the evening, a fireside chat. The conversion was led by emcee Cindy Hallberlin, DHIT General Counsel and Senior Executive, and our featured speaker Kimberly Hames, Engagement Director for Deloitte Digital and a renowned Health Engagement Thought Leader, Growth Strategist, GenAI Innovator, and in her own words, Digital Wonk.
Cindy began the conversation by highlighting Women’s History month and engaging the audience with some lively banter before turning her attention to Kimberly and beginning their discussion around themes such as community engagement, human-centered design, and health equity.
Check out the highlights of the conversation below!
Kimberly began by describing her passionate advocacy for human-centered design in healthcare. Drawing from her personal experience, Kimberly emphasized growing up in a household where she witnessed “the struggles of diabetics, cancer survivors, and dialysis patients.” Her perspective on healthcare was thusly deeply influenced by the importance of patient advocacy and navigating the complex healthcare leviathan, especially with comorbidities. And ultimately, her experience instilled in her a deep sense of empathy and a commitment to improving the patient experience.
Kimberly’s career trajectory reflects her commitment to this cause. Starting at Johnson & Johnson before transitioning to consulting, she discovered her passion for design thinking, recognizing the imperative of keeping the end-user at the core of innovation. Now, as part of Deloitte, Kimberly leads the government and public services practice, “focusing on equity-centered design to ensure that products, services, and experiences are not only feasible and viable but also desirable and equitable. These systems need a human-centered design process–they must be made for the people.”
Central to Kimberly’s approach is community engagement. Her work is guided by clearly defined principles such as understanding power dynamics, personal agency, humility, democracy, and continuous feedback loops. Kimberly remarked that, “by embracing these principles, me and my team aim to design solutions that truly meet the needs of the communities they serve–wherever they are.”
Kimberly’s approach emphasizes the importance of community involvement and empowerment. By prioritizing the voices of those directly impacted by healthcare policies and services, she and her team strive to create solutions that are not only effective but also equitable and inclusive.
Reflecting on her journey, Kimberly emphasized the importance of collaboration and partnership in driving meaningful change and underscored the necessity of working together to address the challenges faced by diverse communities.
In essence, Kimberly’s work exemplifies the transformative potential of empathy-driven design and collaborative partnerships in healthcare. By championing the principles of human-centered design and community engagement, she is paving the way for a more equitable and patient-centric healthcare system. And her unwavering commitment to putting people first serves as an inspiring reminder of the profound impact that human-first principles can have on improving lives and fostering positive changes in healthcare.
Amen to that!
Many thanks and much gratitude to Kimberly for her engaging discussion about the importance of community engagement and human-centered design, Bluedoor Group sponsoring the evening, and our entire ecosystem of partners, supporters, and champions for continuing to coalesce around shared visions of digital transformation to drive meaningful change in how healthcare is designed, delivered and experienced — creating new models of care that will bring the future of health into real-world settings to produce measurable impact.
Join us for our next Happy Hour event on May 23rd in Winston Salem, NC at Flywheel Coworking to break bread, have some cold beverages, and organize around another thought-provoking discussion.
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Talk soon!