Tech Designed with Patients: How Patient Partnerships Shape Better Health Technology

Barbara Lewis, PhD, MBA, interviewed Trevor Berceau, Director of R&D at Epic, an EHR system serving 195 million users and supporting 6.5 billion logins in 2025. Trevor discussed the development of Epic's virtual assistant, Ask Emmie, embedded in MyChart. He described how the Emmie team integrated the patient voice by engaging individual patients and advisory councils, interacting with patients on-...

Barbara Lewis, PhD, MBA, interviewed Donald Lazure, PA, Clinical Strategy Lead for Enterprise, at Commure on how the company has a long history of incorporating the patient voice in development of their technology. By capturing patient data, Commure can customize its products to patients' needs.  

Barbara Lewis, PhD, MBA, interviewed Stefanie Broes, co-founder and CEO of Moonbird, a handheld device to guide breathing and minimize stress and anxiety while improving sleep. She discussed how the company involved users in the product's design and development and how Moonbird incorporates user feedback on an ongoing basis. At Moonbird, customer support is viewed as a gateway for feedback from us...

Barbara Lewis, PhD, MBA, interviewed Kalee Hildreth, Executive Director of Digital Transformation and Marketing Operations at the University of Chicago Medicine, and Chris Pace, Vice President of Healthcare Industry at SearchStax, on how the University of Chicago Medicine used search results captured by SearchStax to improve their patient portal and facilitate patient navigation of MyChart. They u...

Barbara Lewis, PhD, MBA interviewed Adam Cherrington, formerly with KLAS Research and now a strategic advisor and consultant about how companies work with patients in the design and development of their technology. Adam provided examples of tech companies that use patients and discussed the competitive advantages they gain when doing so throughout the design and development process. He offered sev...

Barbara Lewis, PhD, MBA, interviewed Christina Kochan, RN and clinical informaticist at CTG, a healthcare IT consulting firm that has served over 1,000 major healthcare organizations, including children's hospitals, health systems, and academic medical centers. Listen to the discussion on how CTG uses the patient voice to improve technology.

Barbara Lewis, PhD, MBA, interviewed Colin Banas, MD, Chief Medical Officer at DrFirst about Timely, which is an end-to-end engagement platform that supports prescribers in their EHR workflow and engages patients with ongoing, personalized medication support from their healthcare provider. DrFirst, which supports care for more than 100 million patients annually via the nation's largest medication...

Barbara Lewis, PhD, MBA, interviewed Dan McDonald, CEO and co-founder of 86Borders about how they use interactions with health plan members to improve their platform, ConnectAllCare. Rich conversations are the basis for improvements. To enhance those conversations, 86Borders hires local residents to engage plan members and identify pain points that signal areas for improvement. Dan co-established...

Barbara Lewis, PhD, MBA, interviewed Sean Bina, Vice President of Access and Patient Experience at Epic, who discussed the company's five core design principles, the many ways that Epic incorporates patients into their design and development throughout the entire process, and their focus on working side-by-side with customers and end-users in their innovative immersion technique. Epic's Double Dia...

  Barbara Lewis, PhD, MBA, interviewed Ed Marks, CEO of Marx Advisory, who discussed the importance of including the patient voice in developing healthcare technology. He explained that failing to do so can result in wasting money and receiving poorer scores which can lead to poor reimbursement and unhappy patients. He emphasized the need to engage patients by asking for their feedback and listeni...