Kim is a design strategist and healthcare researcher with expertise is applying human-centered design to healthcare’s frontline problems. Her work aligns evidence-based medical interventions with human behavior and real-world settings to accelerate adoption by patients and clinical staff. She has developed, piloted and evaluated patient-centered solutions in diverse care settings (outpatient, inpatient, emergency department) and diverse patient populations (African American, LatinX, Navajo, Veterans, adults, children). Her expertise is the product of decades of innovation consulting, years as a professor of design, and over eight years as a funded healthcare researcher.
Kim runs the Equitable Healthcare Initiative at the IIT Institute of Design’s Action Lab. This cross-sector effort engages community groups, healthcare providers, and industry partners to design, test, and implement high-value care models. Her current focus is developing primary care models that communities want and will use, applying a place-based framework. Most recently, Kim co-found and co-constructed the Institute for Healthcare Delivery Design (University of Illinois at Chicago), a delivery science lab fusing methods from design, implementation science, and the health sciences. Both capability-building efforts apply co-design and collaborative methods to envision and refine new solutions fit to the providers and patients who are expected to use them. She has helped health systems improve the human experience of medicine through team-based quality initiatives, care transitions, and tailoring medical information and processes to fit diverse cultures, patient populations and practice models.
Her funded research work concentrates on interventions for clinical effectiveness, with current support from Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (prenatal care for high-risk pregnancy with Advocate Aurora), and the National Institute of Health (COPD care transitions with University of Chicago’s Dr. Val Press; pediatric asthma care transitions for Navajo children with University of Colorado). Kim is also a writer and strategist, with twenty years’ experience in innovation consulting. Her book, Communicating the New: Methods to Shape and Accelerate Innovation, describes communication methods that help teams create and diffuse critical knowledge inside organizations.