Katie D. McMillan, MPH
Duke Health Associate Director, Mobile App Gateway
For 10 years, Katie McMillan has dedicated her career to imagining and experimenting with technology to improve healthcare for patients and providers. Her experience spans multi-national global health projects, lean software start-ups, and large academic medical centers. In each, Katie has improved organizations from within by identifying challenges and growth opportunities and scrappily testing out solutions. Katie’s latest venture is the creation of the Mobile App Gateway at Duke University Health System. Launched in the summer of 2017, the MAG serves as a consulting firm for clinicians and researchers at Duke interested in using technology to improve healthcare. Katie has been involved in the ideation and creation of over 75 health apps. Katie is also a frequent guest lecturer on mobile technology use in healthcare at UNC-Chapel Hill and Duke University and advises large medical centers on lean innovation strategies. In her free time she runs the Well Made Health account on Instagram (@wellmadehealth) exploring creativity, design, and health technology.
Co- presenter: Justin Kunkel
An experienced ethnographic researcher, Justin Kunkel is responsible for overseeing all research and design at Benjamin & Bond, a boutique healthcare consulting firm. Before focusing on healthcare, he designed large human and technology systems in government, education, startup technology, agriculture and more. Justin believes that everything in life is a process that can be dissected, analyzed and optimized. He’s fascinated by the way the things we use every day work—or don't. Recent projects include a 12-month study of primary care treatment models for opioid use disorder and project optimizing emergency department throughput at a crowded regional medical center. A regular speaker and presenter, in the last few months Justin has been on stage at the Connected Health Conference and the Health Engagement panel at the Digital Health Impact and Transformation Summit.
Poster Title: It takes two to make a thing go right: marrying internal and external innovation talent
There are two major approaches to healthcare innovation: leveraging talent from the inside, or bringing in consultants from the outside. Each approach has its pros and cons, but the most successful environments marry their expertise. In this talk, the founder of the Mobile App Gateway at a major academic medical center and Chief Design Officer at a healthcare design consultancy banter about the advantages and disadvantages of internal and external approaches.
Strong partnerships and well executed projects come when both parties understand the motivation, methods, and pain points of the other. Internal teams have an extremely specific institutional knowledge. They also have the organizational support, access and credibility to keep projects moving forward. However, they are bound by the politics of an organization and may be be mired in a health system’s day-to-day reality. Improvement or technology projects are often piled onto the already-full plates of internal team members as a “when-you-have-time,” item.
Consultants and outside product development teams bring a diverse set of industry experiences and can circumvent the political roadblocks that derail even the most exciting projects. But they can only work in environments conditioned for their success and can easily be undercut intentionally or unintentionally by a lack of cooperation. In this talk, Katie and Justin will share how they work, how people like them can work together and share stories of successful inside/out and outside/in collaboration.
https://duke.edu
