A Level Up: Co-Designing Health Systems from Within

How can we improve health system impact by design?

Health systems increasingly hire designers to help develop human-centered, future-facing strategies and services. At the same time— due to operational and cultural complexity—health system leaders often struggle to translate and scale new practices of any kind. To succeed in these conditions, designers must blend skill in concept development with a parallel concern for organizational uptake. Key questions to answer include: What is the pace for implementation? What are meaningful measures? How do we engage and prepare the organization? And what structures are needed to sustain impact?

Introducing Co-Design Health: a multidisciplinary organization dedicated to advancing the practice, evidence, and impact of human-centered design in healthcare systems. Co-Design Health emerged from the February 2025 Level Up event to respond to a known professional challenge: while design is becoming more embedded in healthcare systems, those doing this work often lack sustained opportunities to connect, learn from one another, and build community.

A Level Up: Co-designing health systems from within brings together designers, researchers, and health system leaders working inside healthcare organizations to share knowledge and build practices. This half-day convening builds on priority topics surfaced at the first Level Up event at the Institute of Design (Feb 2025). We will share and discuss the work of teams who have been advancing these topics throughout the year. And we will foster cross-system learning and connection among those advancing design in health systems.

Agenda

8:30AM INTRODUCTION
Why designing from inside health systems matters now
We step into the growing gap between strategy, innovation, and implementation and explore the role of design in bridging it.

9AM BREAKOUT #1
The missing middle: Why health systems need a development capability
What if design were positioned and understood as a new change infrastructure that can translate strategy to implementation?

10AM Break

10:15 BREAKOUT #2
Improving implementation: tactics from the frontline
Review and discuss implementation tactics: what’s working and what’s missing.

11:15 BREAKOUT #3:
Metrics that matter: how to plan and select impact measures
Review and discuss survey results of how designers in health systems are measuring impact

12:15 LUNCH

1-1:30PM WRAP UP
Next steps: Knowledge-building — Identify topics and priorities for further group development

Participants will:

• Learn how organizations are building internal design capability and moving ideas into practice
• Discuss emerging approaches to measuring the impact of design in complex systems
• Examine how human-centered design is reshaping quality, improvement, and care experience
• Connect with a national community committed to transforming healthcare from within