Experience

Institute of Design (ID)

• United States
• Design Services
• 100 - 200 Employee

• Associate Research Professor

  • Jun 2021 - Present

  Kim leads the Health and Equity Initiative at the IIT Institute of Design’s Action Lab. Projects include the design of high-value primary care that communities want and can use, conducted in partnership with Rush University. The Health and Equity Initiative explores health as a place-based activity that must respond local environmental and social conditions if it is to be community-effective. Projects integrate community groups, healthcare providers, and industry partners into a cooperative development process. Together, they design and test new interventions, services, and strategies that respond to the people and environments where health activities occur—a strategy for equity and cultural inclusion. In this role, Kim continues to teach healthcare design methods to diverse student groups. For the first time, the IIT Institute of Design and Rush University are offering a joint course in which students from both institutions are exploring how to design equitable primary care. Kim has created and delivered curricula tailored for health professionals, health services researchers, medical students, and quality-improvement teams across the United States, and continues to guest lecture and run workshops.



Self-employed

• Healthcare services researcher and innovator

  • Mar 2020 - Present

  Kim is a trained design strategist with expertise in applying human-centered design to healthcare’s frontline problems. Her people-centered approach helps develop and align interventions with human behavior and real-world settings to accelerate adoption by patients and clinical staff. Her expertise is the product of decades of innovation consulting, ten years as a professor of design, and multiple years as a funded healthcare researcher.Kim’s work bridges the fields of design and medicine. On the clinical side, Kim has lead team-based quality initiatives, care transitions, and tailored medical information and processes to fit diverse cultures, patient populations and practice models. Using design methods such as co-design, direct observation of work, and iterative prototyping, her teams produce solutions refined for fit and fidelity. On the research side, Kim has been a named research investigator since 2013 (NHLBI, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Arnold Foundation). She has applied design methods to tailor interventions to diverse patient populations, inform clinical trial protocols, and design recruitment and retention strategies. She is currently a standing member of the AHRQ Healthcare Systems and Value Research study section. Kim is also a communication strategist with twenty years’ experience in innovation consulting. Her book, Communicating the New: Methods to Shape and Accelerate Innovation, offers communication methods to help teams create and diffuse critical knowledge inside organizations. Her focus on the power of experiences to accelerate understanding and build conviction among teams continues to inform her healthcare work.Most recently, Kim helped found and build the Institute for Healthcare Delivery Design (University of Illinois at Chicago). As faculty at the IIT Institute of Design, she also founded and built the Center for Collaborative Healthcare Design as a lab for integrating design thinking into healthcare research.



University of Illinois Chicago

• United States
• Higher Education
• 700 & Above Employee

• Founder and Co-director, Institute for Healthcare Delivery Design

  • Aug 2017 - Mar 2020

  Helping build a new capability that merges medicine, population health, and design to transform how people access and benefit from healthcare. Helping build a new capability that merges medicine, population health, and design to transform how people access and benefit from healthcare.



UIC School of Design

• Research Professor

  • 2017 - Mar 2020



Institute of Design (ID)

• United States
• Design Services
• 100 - 200 Employee

• Associate Professor

  • 2007 - 2017

  Kim Erwin is an Assistant Professor at IIT’s Institute of Design with expertise is in user-centered design methods, which put people at the center of any problem space so as to develop solutions that better fit their everyday lives, activities and context. Design methods are particularly useful in healthcare, where critical medical interventions must be aligned with human behavior in order to be adopted. Kim’s research targets communication methods for collaborative knowledge construction and stakeholder engagement. Her book, Communicating the New: Methods to shape and accelerate innovation, focuses on helping teams explore, build and diffuse critical knowledge inside organizations. Most recently, Kim has been bringing design and communication methods to healthcare. Here she focuses on creating information interventions and tools for use by patients, families, clinicians and staff. She applies methods of Contextual Inquiry to drive foundational research and requirements-gathering. She uses communication methods to create team immersion and engagement in those findings, building shared mind and mission among collaborators. Currently funded healthcare projects include: 1. CHICAGO Plan (PCORI): Designing a new service touchpoint for ER staff and caregivers of children presenting with an asthma attack; this work is in clinical trial across 6 emergency departments in Chicago and will conclude in 2017. 2. RELIANCE (PCORI): Designing a “seamless study experience” for participating clinical staff and patients with COPD; this is a nationwide trial involving 24 clinical sites and 3500 patients in which the Institute of Design serves as the Communication Center. 3. CHICAGO II (NIH): Building a children’s asthma program for Chicago that works across families, homes, schools and medical centers on Chicago’s south and west sides; this is 1-year planning grant to prepare for the NIH U01 application.



Institute of Design

• Visiting Professor

  • 2006 - 2009



ke design

• Consumer strategist and research analyst

  • 2000 - 2009

  Worked with new product development efforts of Fortune 500 companies, focused on the analysis of exploratory user research processes and the resulting large qualitative data sets to drive strategy. Developed new communication methods and processes for bringing stakeholders into contact with research output, responding to the changing information landscape and communication practices inside organizations. Worked with new product development efforts of Fortune 500 companies, focused on the analysis of exploratory user research processes and the resulting large qualitative data sets to drive strategy. Developed new communication methods and processes for bringing stakeholders into contact with research output, responding to the changing information landscape and communication practices inside organizations.



Doblin

• United States
• Design Services
• 1 - 100 Employee

• Research integrator

  • 1993 - 1999

  Worked in then-nascent fields of technology planning, service design using ethnographic methods to lead strategy development. Facilitated synthesis of consumer research and translated findings into strategic insights and finished reports for clients. Worked in then-nascent fields of technology planning, service design using ethnographic methods to lead strategy development. Facilitated synthesis of consumer research and translated findings into strategic insights and finished reports for clients.