Healthcare System Designers Convene at ID to Build a National Community of Practice
By Meghna Prakash
May 3, 2026
On March 20, 2026, the Institute of Design’s Equitable Healthcare Lab (EHL) and Co-Design Health—a design collaborative born from the inaugural Level Up convening in February 2025—co-hosted A Level Up: Co-Designing Health Systems from Within. This half-day convening brought together over 50 healthcare designers, researchers, and health system leaders from 20 healthcare systems across the United States. Held at the Institute of Design in Chicago, this convening expanded on priority topics surfaced at last year’s Level Up event with the goal to share knowledge, build practice, and strengthen a growing national healthcare design community.
From Convening to Community: The Launch of Co-Design Health
A centerpiece of the 2026 gathering was the formal launch of Co-Design Health, a new multidisciplinary collaborative dedicated to advancing the practice, evidence, and impact of human-centered design in healthcare systems. Co-Design Health grew directly out of the 2025 Level Up event and responds to a gap identified by attendees: while design is increasingly embedded in health systems, those doing this work often lack sustained opportunities to connect, learn from one another, and build shared community across organizational boundaries.
An Agenda Focused on Designing from the Inside
Kim Erwin, Director of the Equitable Healthcare Lab, opened the 2026 session by framing why designing from inside health systems matters now. Sarah Rottenberg of the University of Pennsylvania led a panel discussion exploring where change in healthcare comes from with panelists James Stroble, Executive Director, Primary Care Service Line, Rush Medical Group; Jenn Schiffman, Associate Director of Strategy, Institute for Healthcare Delivery Design (IHDD) University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC); and Andrew Schramm, Senior Medical Director, Section of Hospital Medicine, UChicago Medicine (UCM).
A KEY TAKEAWAY
Advancing 3 Dimensions of Design Practice
Three structured breakout sessions explored topics raised in the 2025 Level Up event related to impact:
1. The Missing Middle: Why Health Systems Need a Development Capability
Gary Waymire (Kaiser Permanente School of Medicine) led a review of original research into the difference between operating and development-focused organizations. Waymire made the case that healthcare delivery organizations are largely missing the change infrastructure needed to translate strategic intent into sustainable implementation. Instead, health systems tend to overinvest in quality improvement processes that fix and maintain existing services. Participants shared their agreement with key concepts using the Mentimeter platform to vote. The all-group discussion surfaced a nuanced consensus: yes, a gap exists, but it is not all-or-nothing—a next step might be to better understand the scale and type of gap for different organizations.
2. Improving Implementation: Tactics from the Frontline
Jeremy Beaudry (AVIA) guided participants through new survey data that aggregated implementation tactics from health system designers across the US. Using a World Café format, attendees rotated through 5 implementation stations in the room, each showcasing a subset of implementation tactics. Attendees held station-level discussions about what surprised them, what was missing, and what barriers stood in the way of implementation success. Participants then proposed additional tactics from their own experiences. The group share-out identified an ongoing gap between knowledge and practice: design teams have strategies and tactics they know work, but face structural barriers that include time constraints, organizational silos, and culture that prevent them from being used effectively.
3. Measuring the Impact of Design in US Health Systems
Meghna Prakash (MD Anderson) and Aimee Feuser (Equitable Healthcare Lab) also guided participants through new survey data on how designers are measured in health systems. Also structured as a World Café session, this breakout asked participants to review four categories of impact measures collected in the survey—organizational, intervention, design, and outcomes measures. Participants added their own health system measures and debated which indicators were most relevant. With over 170 measurement indicators reportedly used, the all-group discussion reinforced that current efforts measuring design in health systems are fragmented, lack a clear framework, and collect data that rarely reflects an organization-wide view. A central takeaway emerged: effective measurement of healthcare design will require greater metrics literacy, not just among designers but across teams. Further, effective measurement is important to health design because it functions as both an accountability tool and a communication framework within the larger organization.
What's Next: Eight New Working Groups
Sarah Rottenberg closed the day with a generative session focused on identifying areas of professional practice that this community could tackle next. Individual participants pitched their topics and participants signed up for working groups to address eight areas for development.
Build on concepts from the Missing Middle breakout session to make the case for a development capability inside health systems and to foster organizational buy-in.
Examine the role of designers in guiding responsible and human-centered technology implementation in care delivery.
Build a collection of advice and knowledge assets that can be shared across the healthcare design community.
Explore how to build a system to support collaborative practice and learning.
Continue developing a measurement framework for design in health systems.
Develop a mentorship program to support the growth and development of designers working inside healthcare organizations.
Continue to collect frontline implementation tactics and to develop more actionable guidance on how to achieve impact.
Help designers make the business case for their work and build cross-disciplinary fluency.
Building Momentum
This community is actively building the field of healthcare design. From its roots in the Equitable Healthcare Lab’s landmark 2024 report, The Role of Design in US Health Systems—the first comprehensive assessment of design’s role in healthcare—to the inaugural 2025 Level Up convening to the co-hosted 2026 gathering and launch of eight working groups, practitioners from across the country are building durable infrastructure for cross-institutional learning and practice. This is important, as designers working inside health systems no longer need to be isolated practitioners. They can be part of a community with shared values, ambitions, and building a shared vocabulary and set of tools for achieving change and improving outcomes.
By continuing to host and co-create events like A Level Up, the Institute of Design continues its tradition of advancing the field of design while addressing complex societal challenges through collaborative innovation. And it positions the Equitable Healthcare Lab as an enduring home for those committed to transforming healthcare from within.
The Equitable Healthcare Lab is an Action Lab of the Institute of Design at Illinois Tech. Learn more.