How Are Design Roles Evolving in Healthcare?
September 24, 2025
Amid ongoing job market changes and uncertainties, healthcare stands out as a leading sector for employment growth. With an aging population driving demand, health services continue adding thousands of jobs monthly—and as these organizations expand, they’re increasingly turning to design to tackle complex operational challenges, improve patient experiences, and streamline care delivery.
Research from ID’s Equitable Healthcare Lab, led by Associate Professor Kim Erwin, shows how this trend is creating career pathways across six primary areas—from improving patient experiences to leading organizational transformation.
The lab’s comprehensive report gathered insights from twenty-nine design teams across twenty-seven major health systems, including Boston Children’s Hospital, Mayo Clinic, NewYork-Presbyterian, and St. Jude Children’s Hospital, among others.
These expanding opportunities represent a significant shift, as the most effective design teams are reshaping healthcare delivery across America.
Design Roles in Healthcare
When asked about design staffing, practitioners in top US health systems overwhelmingly reported hiring design strategists and service designers. The next group included design researchers, UX designers, and experience designers, followed by digital product and communication designers.
Many teams noted the difficulty of aligning design specialties with project demands. However, both new and established teams have come to rely on design professionals to improve a range of processes.
Key Areas
By analyzing over 250 projects shared by practitioners, the Equitable Healthcare Lab team identified six primary designer contributions. Both designers and health system leaders rated these six contribution areas as high-volume and high-value to healthcare organizations.
1. Patient Experience
Design helps define and optimize how patients experience the entire health system, from clinical care to administrative services.
By mapping the complete patient journey, designers can see the full picture of what patients go through and identify opportunities to make things better. They create detailed, often visual documentation that shows how care should flow and what coordination is needed to deliver services effectively and efficiently. This work brings together digital tools, physical spaces, and environmental design to create a unified experience that feels seamless to patients rather than fragmented across different departments or systems.
2. Digital Transformation & Product Development
Organizations use design to integrate digital technology throughout health systems, fundamentally changing how they operate and how patients experience care.
By conducting upfront exploration of end-user needs and emerging marketplace opportunities, designers can guide technology decisions to better serve people. They integrate, standardize, and improve enterprise-level infrastructure like electronic medical records to enhance fit, performance, and employee experience. This work also informs smart investment in and incubation of novel startups and technologies.
3. Care Model & Service Line Redesign
Using design to conceive and test new models of care that respond to changes in reimbursement and operating models (e.g., shift to value-based care) or that add capacity and services to the health system.
By identifying the needs and expectations of patients, families, and clinicians, designers can develop service delivery blueprints and test the delivery mechanisms to ensure they work effectively. This work integrates the full range of health system capabilities—technology, environment, communications, and more—into a cohesive service model.
4. Strategy & Planning
Healthcare systems benefit by using design to shape the long-term goals of the system or service lines. Pathways to those goals are explored and executed through design approaches.
Design defines the needs and emerging opportunities in the marketplace, and describes how capabilities of the organization might serve them. Designers work with the institution, patients, and communities to create viable pathways to their desired results.
5. Organizational Development & Training
Design helps build organizational capacity through systematic training programs and innovation centers, improves employee experience, and challenges legacy practices and organizational norms.
Designers shape enterprise-level leadership and innovation programs, disseminate design practices, and propose remedies to systemic issues—such as work processes, recruitment, and retention— to improve employee satisfaction.
6. Quality Improvement
Design improves the performance of existing workflows and delivery systems by engaging with frontline clinicians and administrators to understand their processes, challenges, and capabilities to identify alternatives to established practices and norms.
Types of Design Hires
Types of Design Hires
Design Strategist
Design strategists apply design-thinking principles, business strategy, and customer-centric planning to generate innovative approaches for companies.
Service Designer
Service designers use customer research and process mapping to define and optimize the end-to-end journey for customers and employees—and apply these insights to physical, digital, and experiential touch points.
Design Researcher
Design researchers conduct end-user research to identify needs and gather insights that can guide design processes and solutions.
UX Designer
UX designers apply findings from user research and usability analyses to create a satisfying look and feel of a product, website, or app.
Experience Designer
Experience designers draw on users’ needs, feelings, physical contexts, and mindsets to design experiences and business strategies optimized for efficiency, delight, and value.
Digital Product Designer
Digital product designers integrate end-user needs and priorities, new tech capabilities, and user experience concepts to develop and test new digital products.
Communication Designer
Communication designers develop the visual elements and strategies to engage end-users in relevant content.
Business Designer
Business designers apply the tools of business analysts and strategists with the methods and mindsets of design to develop new business models.
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