Healthcare innovation doesn’t come from dropping in shiny new systems
I sat down with Dr. Chris Olson, Vice President of Design Impact at Mass General Brigham, and was struck by how his journey through medicine and global health has shaped his work today. From refugee camps on the Thai-Burmese border to post-tsunami recovery in Aceh, Chris learned firsthand that healthcare innovation doesn’t come from dropping in shiny new systems. It comes from listening, respecting local expertise, and empowering those already on the frontlines. Whether it was training midwives in newborn resuscitation or finding resource-appropriate tools, his career highlights the power of humility and empathy in driving real change.
At Mass General Brigham, Chris now leads Springboard Studio, a design-thinking platform aimed at making healthcare more human-centered for both patients and the providers experiencing record burnout. He describes design thinking as both a process and a mindset: solving problems with creativity while staying grounded in empathy. Instead of assuming we know the answers, it’s about asking the right questions, uncovering hidden barriers, and co-creating practical solutions with the people most affected. This approach resonates deeply in healthcare, where time pressures and rigid systems often leave little room for curiosity or creativity.
55 Minutes of Thinking, 5 Minutes of Fixing
The results speak for themselves. During COVID-19, Chris and his team transformed a South Korean “testing booth” idea into a “hexapod,” boosting testing capacity by 354%, cutting gown use by 97%, and saving $1M per booth annually. In the heyday of the Pandemic, it was notable how much cooperation and sharing of ideas went on, and that flow of knowledge went both ways.
More recently, they created a low-tech “mobility speedometer” that improved inpatient mobility by 300% and reduced hospital stays. These solutions weren’t flashy, but they worked because they were born from empathy, collaboration, and trust. Chris’s story is a reminder that the future of healthcare innovation isn’t about more technology for its own sake, it’s about design grounded in human experience, creativity, and the courage to rethink how we solve problems together.
At the heart of it all, the lesson is simple: true healthcare innovation doesn’t come from adding more technology or piling on new processes, it comes from listening with empathy, involving the people closest to the problem, and giving them the tools and confidence to create change. When we combine humility with creativity, we don’t just design better systems. W15e design better outcomes for patients, providers, and communities alike.
Check out the MGH Springboard Studio check them out at http://www.mgbspringboardstudio.org
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Raw Transcript
Nick van Terheyden
Nick, welcome to this special edition of News You Can Use. I’m your host. Dr Nick, and joining me today is Dr Chris Olsen. He’s the Vice President of Design impact at the Mass General Brigham health system. Chris, thanks for joining me today.
Kris Olson
Thanks so much for having me. Dr Nick,
Nick van Terheyden
so if you would provide us a little bit of a background, you’ve got an interesting, diverse background. You practice medicine, you’ve engaged in a whole number of areas. I think it’s important for the discussion that we’re going to have to get a little bit of context of you and how you arrived at this point in your career, if you would, right.
Kris Olson
I think sometimes, looking back, you can create a narrative. But I’ll, I’ll sort of start from the beginning. I’m from Western Canada, and went to the University of British Columbia and said I’d never work inside, never wear a tie. And ended up getting a scholarship. And when I wanted and ultimately decided to go to medical school. And I went to the Vanderbilt University School of Medicine. And before I finished, I went and did a Masters of Public Health in Australia, which I thought was really interesting, looking back at the US health system from an external Vantage. And I did that as a US Fulbright scholar, and I came back, still wondering what I would do. And then ended up really deciding to train in internal medicine and pediatrics. And I, I came to the Boston ecosystem, at Boston Children’s Hospital and Mass General Hospital, and trained. I was going to be here for four years, and that was 27 years ago, and
Nick van Terheyden
so you didn’t mention that when we were talking before that you were from down under, so I don’t pick up even the strangest moment of the accent in there. Did you drop
Kris Olson
it? Well, I’m actually from Western Canada, but I just had studied for my masters in in Sydney, at the University of Sydney, but I don’t have any
Nick van Terheyden
you didn’t pick up the accent. It’s such a because, of course I did when I was working down there. I love the whole attitude. And, you know the opportunities down there. I think they’re, they’re sort of focus on the world is, you know, just really invigorating. It’s no worries, you know, all the way through so, so if you would tell us a little bit about what you do and some of the backdrop to, you know, the functions and the areas that you’re you think about, yeah,
Kris Olson
well, what I do now is is lead a design thinking platform in our health system, the springboard studio and and really, our aim is to make healthcare more user friendly. And it might not be any surprise to you that that there are many opportunities to make healthcare more patient centric, but at the same time as being patient centric, being focused as well on the providers, on the staff members and those people that are experiencing unprecedented levels of burnout,
Nick van Terheyden
you know, it’s interesting. You say that one of the things that I learned, I think, many years into my career, was the fact that if you don’t take care of the carers, they’re never going to survive any of this. And you know, I certainly know I have my own experiences with that. It’s, it’s deeply personal for many of us, for a variety of reasons, tell us a little bit about some of the activities that you’ve been involved in and what you’ve seen.
Kris Olson
Yeah, well, I’ll tell you some. Some of the really influential events that happened in my life were early in my career, when I went overseas after doing a diploma in tropical medicine in London and then spending a year with refugees on the Thai Burmese border, I was told you’re going to be alone. You’re going to be the only medical doctor in these two refugee camps. And pretty quickly I realized I was anything but alone and just witnessing the the grit, resilience and ingenuity of the people that I was working with in these refugee camps was so humbling, and it was just so fascinating how people could do so much make the. Lives better with so little and under incredible pressures, and that really influenced me for the remainder of my career.
Nick van Terheyden
I’ve I’ve had very similar experiences. I mean, I think it’s always extraordinary, and it’s funny you say that. I mean, when you’re out in remote areas, you are quite often isolated, or things have gotten significantly better with, you know, connections and the ability to sort of pull in, and I’ve interviewed folks who’ve capitalized on some of the technologies that we have to be able to allow you to consult. But you are isolated, but I want to pick on something you mentioned or said that really stands out to me, and it’s the fact that you’re not alone and you’re not and I think you didn’t describe this, but tell me if this is true, what you’re really referring to is the incredible numbers of folks who have stepped up to deliver and to be part of the caring system. And, you know, I’ll pick one specific example that was, you know, formative in my past, which was the midwives, or the doulas, as they call the fact that they do most of the delivery out in those places. Is that what you were talking about, share a little bit of that.
Kris Olson
Yeah, it’s, it’s a really perfect segue, because I ended up finishing that year on the Thai Burmese border, and I would be responsible for making the UN morbidity mortality reports on a weekly basis. And, and you know, expats are not allowed to stay in refugee camps for very good reasons. So it in the mornings I would be reading the deaths. And there were so many times that I was writing down stillbirth, stillbirth, stillbirth, and, and really it was going into the situation and talking to the midwives to ask what was happening when they delivered babies to really get to the the lesion with newborn resuscitation and and that led me on to a career where I still work in the realm of resuscitation and innovating around that. When I finished that year on the Thai Burmese board, did a bunch of training, of of resuscitation, bringing the equipment they needed to where they’re delivering, rather than have them run with a cold, non breathing baby to the bamboo hospital on stilts, during which time they would they would die. I i took a role with the European Commission for humanitarian organizations in Aceh post tsunami. So I spent three years, four months a year, but working between Mass General Hospital, where I’m a member of the core educator faculty as an internist, and then I would be in western Aceh training a cohort of midwives. What was amazing is these midwives were were very knowledgeable about what their constraints were, and so when we went in and I suggested, I said, What would you like us to focus on? And they were like, look, we deliver the majority of our babies in the homes of of pregnant women and and here are some of the problems we have, and they ultimately decided to focus on on newborn care and resuscitation and management of postpartum hemorrhage. And these really courageous, mostly women, in fact, in a they were all women called badons. Then I went and and the European Commission said they would purchase whatever materials they needed. It was fascinating. The the women didn’t choose an expensive bag valve mask device, which is the device that most people know well that you squeeze air into it has a mask that you put over the baby’s face. You don’t need oxygen. You really just need to get air into the lungs and and they chose not the $25 bag valve mask device, but a device that that was made in Java and cost $8 because they were anticipating when the European Commission would pull out, and they said, I can’t replace these. I don’t even have a credit card, but I can purchase them for $8 and they became a marker of medical sophistication, and it was one of the means of gainful employment for for women. And so they would hold this up, these devices only when they’d been trained. And have to say, developed a training network of 321 midwives that were really a trainer of the trainer program. Hmm, and, and it was remarkable, the numbers of of successful resuscitations they had. In fact, we compared it at the end in these two counties that I worked into the next county over and when somebody actually attempted ventilation, most babies did well, like about 8% of them would would live. But the difference was, there was more than double the attempts where these midwives had been trained and been, you know, basically gaining the self efficacy, or the confidence to even give an attempt, and then they had them. So, you know, it’s even in places where they’ve been trained. Many people won’t even try, but then you have to equip them with the materials and then, and then give them the confidence to actually take action that should happen within a minute of birth. And so that really gave me a lot of insight into how essential it was to not come in and import a system, but really understand what are the barriers in your lives and and so really I would I would take me about 48 hours by the time I got off a float plane in West ache and midwives would meet me at the plane and say, Come out to see this baby that I resuscitated, that you know, otherwise died. So inspirational, and that really led to a lot of my subsequent work.
Nick van Terheyden
It’s, it’s extraordinarily rewarding because, you know, it’s, it is, it’s the difference between life and death, and it’s in, you know, very poverty stricken resource lacking areas. You know, the impact on a family when that happens. You know, completely isolated, just extraordinary. And you know, I’m so glad to hear you share that with all of the detail and the fact that they come and, you know, they do, they hold up. Hey, look, this is what we did. This is what you did. As part of that you talked earlier, you said, you know, design thinking help the listeners understand what you mean by that and how all of this applies.
Kris Olson
Right design thinking, really, I like to emphasize, because it’s not a common entity within healthcare, even though we’re such a human focused industry should be. So I define design thinking as both a process and a mindset, and the process, I say, is just a process with the goal, the end goal, being implementation. So it’s very practically driven, but where the the tools that you use are creative problem solving, tools to come up with better solutions that are more compelling and resonant to the end user, and then the mindset that I’m talking about is that the best designers, and we really want to democratize this notion of design. Herbert Simon, Nobel Prize winner in economics, said, Anyone designs who endeavors to change a current situation to a preferred one. So all of us are doing design essentially all the time, but the mindset of of the designer is really twofold. Is they have to have the humility of going in and saying, we don’t necessarily understand this problem completely, and often have it entirely incorrect or only understand it from our own vantage and until you understand it from those other perspectives, you don’t really get a full understanding of the problem. And then the next part of that that that humility, is having the empathy to then understand the problems, not in a way that confirms your assumptions, but in a way that really understands and I think that’s some of the fun part of design thinking, is having these aha moments where I’ve had people look at each other and go, that’s your problem. Oh, that’s not a problem for us. But like and then somebody saying, oh, and your what I thought was your barrier was not the one I thought. And they come up with incredible solutions that we wouldn’t have otherwise thought of without taking that time to really understand what the challenges are.
Nick van Terheyden
It reminds me a lot of the sort of root cause analysis that you see with air traffic control or not air traffic control, with air accidents. And you know, the formalized process we have a little bit of that, perhaps with morbidity and mortality meetings, but it doesn’t seem to permeate out. Is that part of what’s going on is it? Are we missing that part two, empathy part that says, hey, we’ve discovered this. But when. Sort of rolling it out, is that what’s going on?
Kris Olson
Yeah, we found it in many different aspects so So doing this overseas,
Speaker 1
it it was
Kris Olson
clear that you wouldn’t understand necessarily from from the aspect of a of a physician trained in in a high income country, going to a low income setting, as we’ve really been focused and working in our own health system, what you realize is that this notion of people coming up with a nice solution on paper and saying, oh, and then this person will just do this task, added to their job, or do this task, and we’re going to solve that challenge. You just realize that’s not the way it works. And so we often will quote the use the Einstein quote, where he said, If I had an hour to solve a problem, I’d spend 55 minutes understanding the challenge and five minutes working on a solution. And and I’ll say that we really do it, and it seems like it’ll take longer to get to solutions. So until people go through the process and realize that the solution that they come up with is really more compelling then, then, then, you don’t realize how much time can be saved by solving the correct the problem
Nick van Terheyden
correctly, right? It’s, you know, trite, almost to mention it, but, you know, it reminds me one of the presidents, I think, said at some point, you know, sharpening the AX before cutting the tree down. You know, you spend all that time for the prep work, and this is the prep work that’s sort of missing. I’m sure some people listening to this are going to say, Well, yeah, but that’s overseas. How does this apply to the US? We’re completely different. We don’t need this would be my and to be clear, I’m not saying that, but I feel like that’s what I might hear. How would you respond?
Kris Olson
Well, one thing is, there’s some understandable reasons why we that healthcare here is resistant to change. One we’re so time constrained. The systems have evolved over decades and and many times people are worried because the stakes are high there. They think that, Oh, if we mess up this part of the system, we’ve always done it this way, or we’ve done it this way for the last 1020, 30 years, it’s going to mess up the whole apple cart. The other real barrier that we find is that even though healthcare has attracted all these people to it that are intent on helping humans, and, you know, helping care for and and wanting to empathize with them, and they’re intelligent, we Haven’t stimulated the creativity aspect of of people’s lives, or of people’s work lives and so so people really learn evidence based medicine. It’s understandable that you wouldn’t necessarily be sitting there saying, You know what are, what’s a better way to do this, but when you create and carve out just a little bit of space where people can say, how might we solve this challenge, or what’s the world we want to live into? And really one thing that David Kelly gets to from the from the design school, and one of the co founders of of IDEO, he talks about creative confidence, and it’s something that we really stimulate with with healthcare providers and staff members, is trying to get that creativity gene, if you will, exercise so that, so that people are more often looking at problems with curiosity. We think of curiosity being as the close cousin of creativity. And there’s a number of techniques we’ll do to try to get people to be curious about a certain challenge. Yeah.
Nick van Terheyden
So I always come up with these little things as people are talking, and I’m, you know, Curiosity killed the cat, of course, is, you know, that’s, that’s killing your sort of creative confidences. And I’m wondering where that particular phrase came from, as you think about the US. I mean, my, my sense is that we’re really not I mean, maybe in some maybe you have some examples of where we’ve applied these concepts successfully. Other places to sort of hold out, to try and encourage people to say, hey, look, this is this is what you can achieve.
Kris Olson
Yeah, let me we have a bunch of examples. I have some from overseas and some from here, some from the pandemic, which is when we were really. Asked to to work across our health system because we, I was, I led a pillar of the Center for covid innovations. It’s called the whole body protection pillar and and at that time, there were some, you know, we had to work quickly. People didn’t stand the the pandemic. People were fearful and and we were asked if we could improve the process of testing for for covid there. And then we really delved into that request from our leadership, saying, why? Like, what is it that you want us to solve and and it came down to the fact that our CEO actually saw a video from South Korea where they had built these phone booths where they were reaching in with boy in the bubble arms to test people within the phone booth. And she sent us this video and said, Can you build one of these? And so we, we actually, within nine days, we had a working prototype in in a parking garage outside of one of our community hospitals, and it was the nurses when we went in with humility, saying, is this right? We jumped on the phone with this hospital in South Korea, and they said, Oh, this is how we did X, Y or Z. And it was the nurses that said, Hey, why aren’t I inside that that phone booth? And then we added a HEPA filter to it and and they said, We’re going to be able to work quicker. Because one of the things that the that our leadership wanted was, was we wanted to save on gowns and PPE. We wanted to keep our staff safe, and we wanted to increase the throughput. Well, just from their inputs, we turned the booth inside out, and we called it a hexapod with six arms, and so they would test a person at each wall, and then, and then, when we looked through what the results were, it increased the testing capacity, 354% it dropped the gown usage 97% because the person in the HEPA filter didn’t have to change gowns between patients And the ones that were cleaning the outside of the booth had could wear one gown because they weren’t being exposed directly to patients. And then each booth saved the health system, our health system, a million dollars on an annualized basis. And that’s just that didn’t include any revenue generation from doing the test, just pure savings of performing those.
Nick van Terheyden
And so I’m curious, as you, did you ever find out? Did the Korean version of that flip around based on your insights? Did they say, Oh my God, that’s brilliant.
Kris Olson
Yeah, we had some great exchanges, just from the barriers dropping within within healthcare, and they would ask us about how it went. And so it was this great exchange. I’ll give you just one quick example of now, post pandemic, we were asked if we could help increase inpatient mobility. There’s great evidence that people in hospitals that move recover quicker and have less delirium. And when we really did this with a community hospital, in partnership with our population health management group, who are thinking about giving better care at lower cost, we could have come up with a lot of different solutions that were higher tech, but what it came down to was a communication tool called the now called the mobility speedometer, which hangs at the side of beds, where patients, family members, providers, all understand what is the current mobility status of a patient, and then say, within any realm, even if you’re bed bound, what three exercises can you do on a daily basis? And it’s really dramatically improved. When we studied that in 2500 patients at a community hospital, people moved 300% more. The decline went from 41% decline after you’re admitted to the hospital in terms of mobility, down to 19% and the length of stay dropped. Point one, seven days for medicine patients. Point two, five for surgical So the results were really practical, and it ended up being an elegant solution that didn’t cost hardly anything. Wow.
Nick van Terheyden
So fantastic, sort of insights. You know, the innovation that this brings in terms of the process and the mindset. You know, the importance of humility, which you know we struggle with sometimes because of, you know, the background to all the training you’re at. Top of your capabilities, that can be very difficult, but you know, the building of that empathy to really understand creates this. You know, as you describe it and I like it, you know, creative confidence tremendously important. So many opportunities, you know, fantastic for folks to learn about. Unfortunately, as we do each and every week, we’ve run out of time. So I’m just going to say thanks to not Pluto for bringing us this episode, and thanks to you, Dr Chris Olsen for joining me. I would tell the listeners, check out the MGH Springboard studio that’s at MGB Springboard studio.org, O, R, G, Chris, thanks for joining me today.
Kris Olson
Yeah, thanks so much for having me. Dr, Nick.
