Lead Service Designer

The Lead Service Designer shapes, leads, and implements initiatives to improve and transform healthcare access, experience, quality and equity across a healthcare network that serves vulnerable patients. The Lead Service Designer conducts design research, facilitates collaborative problem definition, identifies gaps in care. Your role would include mapping workflows and designing system and service delivery improvements that facilitate optimal health of the population. To achieve this, you should excel at working with internal and external partners to analyze a problem and brainstorm solutions to address them.  The Lead Service Designer may also serve as project or change manager or support other teams and entities in implementing improvements and assessing results. Design focus areas may cover a broad range of domains, including clinical quality improvement, medical practice transformation, network expansion, or advancement towards new models of care including value-based care, virtual care, mobile care, etc. You are an ideal candidate if you value understanding a problem, defining a solution, and working with others to bring it to life. Reporting to the Senior Director of Healthcare Access, this role encompasses design and the implementation of new solutions.

In order for your application to be considered, please submit a cover letter, resume, and a pdf or link to of your portfolio showcasing your service design skills (3-6 projects that you have worked on).

Telework
This position is approved to telework however staff member must be physically onsite 2-3 days a week for onsite meetings at the PCC Headquarters office in Silver Spring, Md. or at customer locations to perform certain duties. Note: PCC employees must reside in the following five states and District of Columbia: MD, VA, WVA, DE, PA. & DC. Relocation costs are not provided.

Essential Activities

1. Scopes and defines challenges that inhibit healthcare access, experience, quality or equity.

• Collaborates with partners, PCC program leaders and data analytics team members to define standards and measures of effectiveness for network access, patient and provider experience, quality, or equity.
• Conducts secondary research, analyzes qualitative and quantitative data, and synthesizes information to become knowledgeable about a problem context, to define the magnitude of a challenge, or assess the gap between the current state and a benchmark.
• Combines and shares secondary research and analytical information to shape design research plans and approaches to inform further learning about the challenge.
• Conducts best practice research to inform solutions that have worked in analogous or similar environments to help inform possible solutions.

2. Provides expertise in service design to research, and design or prototype new or improved policies, programs, models, services, or products that advance healthcare access, experience, quality, or equity.

• Leads ethnographic research and contextual design investigations to understand behaviors, pain points, needs, aspirations with the goal of identifying the root causes of presenting healthcare challenges.
• Drives synthesis and insight generation, with an emphasis on collaboration and effective group facilitation to guide decision makers and teams along the journey.
• Provides systems-level thinking and workflow analysis to dissect and interpret the entire ecosystem of a service or system.
• Communicates, envisions, and develops design deliverables (ideas, service models, customer journeys, scenarios, personas, system maps, workflows, service blueprints, infographics, recommendations) and artifacts in support of advocating for strategies that advance access, quality, experience, and equity.

3. Partners with PCC program and internal support teams and safety-net leaders to prioritize, plan, and manage improvements projects and solution implementations.

• Leads committees (including Quality Health Improvement Committee), work groups or workshops to gather input, socialize findings, prioritize solutions and plan approaches to implement solutions or improvement interventions.
• Develops project plans, resource requirements, and cost estimates to support program, model, service or product changes; and fosters collaborative relationships with stakeholders to ensure plans have input from those directly affected or with relevant experience.
• May serve as project/change manager to support implementation activities; works with partners to mitigate risks, facilitate open communications, & ensure project success.
• May directly oversee consultants and matrixed staff that provide performance improvement, change management, staff education/training, or practice transformation efforts to support safety-net clinics to achieving targets set for access, experience, quality, or equity and other targets as needed.
• Updates strategies, tools and tactics as needed and by gathering stakeholder feedback to support the evolving program, service or product design requirements across the healthcare network.

4. Measures and monitors progress, and updates strategies and approaches as needed.

• Partners with PCC program leads and data analytics and informatic team members to define and implement strategies to measure, capture, monitor and report status of access, quality or experience.
• Compares metrics to standards, benchmarks, goals (e.g. program, model, or service design requirements; or industry best practices such as HEDIS, HCAPS).
• Collaborates with technical team to facilitate education and training to inform healthcare network and PCC program staff of data capture needs, approaches and reporting requirements. Appropriately engages technical team to resolve data reporting issues that require training across system and workflows.
• Identifies progress and gaps towards meeting measures; in partnership with Senior Director of Healthcare Access, partners, PCC program leaders and other stakeholders, identifies path forward and priorities for closing the gaps.

5. Represents, upholds and builds PCC’s reputation as a convening entity, committed to open, equitable and effective collaborations towards common goals – with internal and external partners.

• Develops and maintains effective relationships with internal and external stakeholders (e.g. Montgomery County Department of Health and Human Services, network providers).
• Develops methods to consistently listen to and hear partner and stakeholder needs. Convenes meetings, researches and disseminates information of value to internal and external partners and stakeholders.
• Contributes to creating a cohesive and productive work environment for teams, committees, work groups led by this role or on which this role participates. Oversees short term teams matrixed for project purposes. Clearly defines and communicates expectations to individuals, teams, committees and work groups, developing charters as needed.
• Escalates issues appropriately and seeks consultation from supervisor to address team/program challenges.

Additional Responsibilities 

• Keeps abreast of emerging environmental shifts and innovation approaches advancing or changing care for economically vulnerable, uninsured, underinsured, and/or immigrant populations. Synthesizes implications of changes and updates improvement strategy and operations accordingly.
• Provides recommendations to government entities and advocacy groups on policy, program, service, and product changes and additional funding needs.
• With PCC Fund Development Team, identify and direct grant-funded health care improvement projects, including contributing to written grant proposals, and assuring the development and tracking of workplans, management of grant funds and renewals, and submission of timely updates and project evaluations to funders/other stakeholders.
• Participates in the Health Care Access management team and in programmatic activities, PCC internal work groups and committees as appropriate, as well as individual and organizational development activities.
• Other duties as assigned.

Skills and Abilities

• Exceptional visual, written and oral communication skills to communicate effectively with a broad range of stakeholders including patients and families, clinicians, hospital administrators and public health officials, and PCC peers, staff and leadership.
• Strong research, analysis, synthesis and storytelling skills to advocate for/justify a position, frame a challenge, or describe progress towards a goal.
• Ability to develop and maintain trusted relationships with healthcare providers, patients, and staff to advocate effectively on behalf of patients, families and underserved communities.
• Strong team leadership skills, works collegially, engenders accountability and is a proven team builder; takes a consultative approach to establishing work plans and incorporates the viewpoints of senior leaders, staff, and peers.
• Ability to remain politically perceptive, work well under pressure and shift priorities based on contextual requirements.
• Proven program or project management skills and an ability to organize, develop, implement, monitor, and evaluate professional workplan goals and performance objectives.
• Excellent organizational and time management skills with the ability to develop, implement, monitor, and evaluate workplans and performance objectives; meet deadlines; collaborate with staff and peers; and manage multi-faceted projects with attention to detail.
• Ability to develop and forecast programmatic budgets.
• Demonstrated effective computer skills, including the ability to quickly learn how to use new applications and software. Highly proficient in collaborative tools (e.g. Miro), visual design tools (Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator) and Microsoft Office suite of products (Outlook, Excel, Word, PowerPoint, SharePoint, Teams, Visio).
• Self-motivated with the ability to work independently with minimal supervision.
• Familiarity and comfort working with diverse, immigrant populations and vulnerable communities who may speak languages other than English.

Education and Experience

• Minimum of 6 years of healthcare industry experience.
• Minimum 3 years of experience with service design, design thinking, design research, business design, or customer experience strategy, with 2+ years of this experience improving healthcare in a design role.
• 3+ years leading external or client-facing projects.
• 2+ years of personal or professional experience working with underserved communities, preferably with immigrant populations.
• Bachelor’s degree required.
• Portfolio demonstrating experience leading projects from initial design research phase, to brainstorming and prioritizing ideas, and finally implementing solutions at scale; portfolio should demonstrate working on a service design project from beginning to end and should be submitted with application.
• Experience using a diverse range of facilitation techniques in different environments.
• Experience with using field-based observation and in-depth interviews (aka ethnographic fieldwork, generative research), and making sense of qualitative and quantitative data.
• Experience creating implementation plans for solutions.
• Experience with negotiation and setting expectations against real world limitations.
• Formal training and experience in a human-centered design, process improvement, quality improvement, and/or service design methods desirable.
• Experience and proficiency in mapping workflows for the purposes of designing, analyzing and improving the workflows; and establishing how data, IT systems, or other digital tools (e.g. Electronic Health Record) enable workflows.
• Bilingual or fluency in Spanish is a plus.