INNOVATION
How to Succeed With Digital Innovation in 5 Days
Most health systems focus their efforts on patient care, and rightfully so. However, diagnosis and treatment services are only one piece of the puzzle. In fact, health systems taking a truly human-centered approach to designing their physical and digital footprints must consider other aspects of a patient’s care journey and develop a shared vision for how that can and should look for their individual organizations.
On paper, this sounds like a long, challenging process—and it can be. That said, many health systems don’t have the luxury of time in today’s competitive environment. During a session entitled “Succeed with Digital Innovation in Five Days” at the 2025 SHSMD Connections Conference in Dallas, Daniel Small, Vice President of Digital Services at Hartford HealthCare, and Jill McCormick, Executive Vice President of Design and Product Development at Pixel Health, shared how Hartford HealthCare used a modified Google Design Sprint to align stakeholders across the enterprise around a shared vision for patient experience.
Small described how cross-functional teams worked together to map how patients ideally move through the health system and identify where digital touchpoints support—or hinder—their journey. This collaborative process enabled Hartford HealthCare to meaningfully improve, and in some cases transform, the patient experience, contributing to what Small described as one of the nation’s most people‑centric approaches to care.
He recalls, “That was the goal—to transform into a connected digital ecosystem, one that meets people where they are, simplifies every interaction, and builds trust through experience. Because our scale, our complexity can’t become our patients’ confusion. We are building a system that knows them, guides them, and connects them to the right care at the right time.”
But can it be done in five days?
The Sprint
Hartford HealthCare, which operates 500 locations in Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Massachusetts, including nine acute-care hospitals, needed to get buy-in across the health system fairly quickly, as it was in the process of reimagining a new facility at its main campus, Hartford Hospital, in Connecticut’s capital. Leadership hoped to use this high-stakes opportunity to “reimagine the digital patient journey throughout the system,” according to Small.
“I found myself in a room with futurists, architects, project managers, and leaders from the hospital and throughout the system and I didn’t understand the purpose at first,” Small recalls. “As the meeting went on, we were going through a litany of technologies, essentially a menu for a restaurant with 15 pages where they do everything from meatloaf and potatoes to pot stickers. You know your experience at a restaurant like that isn’t going to be great.”
Discussion centered around technologies such as touch-screen navigation, virtual nursing, and facial recognition.
“I remember thinking, ‘How are we going to design an experience for patients and their families by looking at a menu of technologies? You can’t pick technologies without a picture of the experience you’re hoping to deliver.”
With construction looming, Small and his team brought in Pixel Health, which has developed a version of the Google Sprint approach, modified to the unique needs of health care organizations. The original sprint process is a five-day, structured framework developed by Google Ventures to solve operational challenges using design, prototyping, and testing. By condensing months of work into a single week, teams can validate ideas quickly with reduced costs and improved efficiencies, according to Google Ventures.
“Too often, we end up creating isolated solutions that lead to disconnected experiences,” Small notes. For Hartford HealthCare, the goal of the “sprint” was to create “a shared vision of the patient experience among stakeholders.”
Ideally, as you design, “you know what your north star is,” he adds.
The Process
For Hartford HealthCare, identifying that “north star” began with a two-day session that included stakeholders from across the health system.
The process began with an understanding that receiving care is only a portion of the patient journey through a health system. McCormick cites survey data demonstrating that 96% of all patient health care complaints are service quality–related—encompassing concerns such as wait times and access, communication and follow-up, staff attitude and professionalism, billing and financial transparency, room cleanliness, and care team responsiveness.
“First we have to nail down what kind of experiences we want to provide our patients, and build from there,” she says. “There’s science around the moments that matter.”
The two‑day session at Hartford HealthCare was designed to inspire the “art of the possible” by looking across Pixel Health’s broader client base, industry partners, and leading solutions and futurists both within and beyond healthcare. The work grounded innovation in a belief that anything designed must reflect state‑of‑the‑art thinking, not incremental change. The goal is to spark dialogue, challenge assumptions, and inform future‑ready design decisions.
“We wanted to inspire ideas that go beyond the physical space,” McCormick explains. Essentially, the meeting asked attendees to “take what you know about current state [of the health system] and reframe it as, ‘How might we’ statements. This reframes the mind from what problems do we need to solve to what opportunities do we have to improve.”
The result was a four-step process as follows:
1. Describing the whole patient journey and focusing on moments that matter. “When we actually interrogate the process, we find the moments that matter occur around where care is delivered—the pre-visit experience and post-visit experience,” Small explains. For Hartford HealthCare, this meant enabling personalized onboarding, seamless arrival, and efficient care transition.” “When we talk about how patients experience care, we have to consider this as an interconnected journey,” McCormick adds.
2. Diagramming detailed patient journey mapping. McCormick describes this as the most difficult part of the session, saying, “When you say you’re going to focus on seamless onboarding, what does that actually mean?” Stakeholders need to ask: Where does the patient journey start at their health system. Are patients at home? What devices are they using? The answers to these questions will be different for different health system. At Hartford HealthCare, attendees created “storyboards” that outlined the participants vision for what the patient journey can and should be.
3. Selecting the right technology. This entails identifying tech-enabled moments in the patient journey and finding ways in which technology can enhance, automate, or simplify the journey. Leadership at Hartford HealthCare considered both new innovations and better uses for existing tools, according to Small. They also considered changes to workflows, and staff roles and responsibilities. Small recalls, “We asked, ‘What kind of digital tools will bring this to life? What infrastructure needs to be in place behind the scenes? And how do we make sure the experience is seamless and scalable?’ This is a critical part of the sprint process. It helps us move from 'What should the experience be?' to 'What needs to be true for this to work?’”
4. Implementing the vision. This is the execution stage. Once the patient experience vision has been defined, the solutions used to create it need to be tested and aligned. The goal is to integrate and operationalize the vision, and to accomplish it effectively, teams must assign leadership for each initiative and “align/spin up design teams,” according to Small. The vision must be embedded in construction and technology planning, he adds, with systems put in place to monitor progress and prioritize tasks.
Ultimately, as the Hartford HealthCare case illustrates, “patient experience is a shared responsibility,” Small says.“Because we used this initial process, instead of me being asked further down in the process questions like, ‘Are we going to have kiosks?’ I’m being called into meetings with engineers asking, ‘Does this [initiative] fit into the vision we discussed?’ We can truly design for seamlessness across every interaction.”
“Every investment in your digital and physical environment is a bet on your growth,” McCormick adds. “Human-centered design … can help bring the competitive edge you seek.”
