BLOG

General gaps in healthcare come in many flavors: malfunctioning of a tool or process, the absence of a tool or process, lack of a shared mental model during clinical procedures, communication issues, system inefficiencies, awkward workflows, transportation, physical space challenges, healthcare disparities, security issues, etc. Designers working in the healthcare field are charged with organizing […]

At the d. School I co-teach design thinking courses that focus on healthcare issues. I am particularly interested in maternal and infant healthcare, healthcare equity and how physicians are trained. I am fortunate to have developed relationships with attending physicians, nurses, lactation consultants and occupational therapists through my research and design work at Stanford’s Pediatric […]

Maternal Life and Primo-Lacto®: A Closed System For Colostrum Collection was featured in this article by Gavin Stern for AAMI.

When I was a student at the d. School, I remember that ethnographic research always seemed rushed, we rarely had any assistance with finding suitable people to interview and insights were expected to magically appear after two hours of conducting interviews over one afternoon. I was often frustrated with the attitude d. School instructors brought […]

I am co-teaching a new d. School class, Design For Health Equity: Redesigning Healthcare Delivery with Dr. Lee Sanders, Stanford’s Chief of General Pediatrics this quarter at Stanford’s d. School. In this class, our aim is to imagine novel interventions that may reduce health disparities for discharged NICU children with medical complexity. We are focused on patients […]

  Sasha had given birth to preterm twins at 30 weeks. She was instructed to pump and hand-express her colostrum into a bottle or medicine cup. It was awkward to use the breast pump because the colostrum got stuck in the valve of the pump, and nurses had to scrape it out. After using the […]

I took up running a little over a year ago. I could run at best two miles, and at the end of my run I would feel exhausted. Even worse, I just wanted it to be over. Not only was I in cardiovascular pain, but I was anxious. Could I do it? Could I go a little […]

Maternal Life LLC, my company, has recently completed a clinical pilot study on Primo-Lacto at three different hospitals: Sharp Mary Birch in San Diego, CA, John Muir Hospital in Walnut Creek, CA, and Indiana Memorial Hospital in South Bend, IN. Primo-Lacto Study Results (With P-values) Jules Sherman, MFA, Dr. Henry Lee MD, Neonatologist LPCH, Dr. Nancy […]

Wednesday, 1:07am Story In… “You’re doing okay, the baby is out…one more little push. You have some bleeding, I’m going to press down a little here. Nurse, can you get me the Bakri balloon please. This is definitely a hemorrhage…” “Which Bakri do you want? The old or new model?” “I don’t know which is […]

I’m co-teaching a course this summer at Stanford’s d. School with Dr. Henry Lee, Hamsika Chandrasekar and Seamus Harte called “Gaining Patient Perspectives On Disease.” We have called the class “The Empathy Project” on this website. Dr. Lee was awarded a grant by the Stanford Medical School to pursue an experimental course that uses storytelling as […]