Congratulations to 40 Under 40 Winner: Kelsey Buhr, Manager, Strategic Design and Innovation, Marshfield Clinic Health System
Get To Know Kelsey:
- Age (as of December 31, 2023): 32
- Hometown: West Salem, Wisconsin
- Alma Mater:
- University of Minnesota – Twin Cities School of Public Health (Master of Healthcare Administration)
- University of Wisconsin – Eau Claire (Bachelor of Science)
- Number of Years of Experience in Healthcare: 16
- Someone You Look Up to in the Industry: Latha Sivaprasad MD, Regional Chief Medical Officer VA New England Health Care System
- Favorite Band or Musician: The National
- Your Favorite thing about healthcare:
- We are so fortunate in healthcare to be surrounded by natural innovators. People who are drawn to healthcare tend to already have the skills that make great innovators - they are compassionate, adaptable, and curious. This makes them fantastic problem solvers and why innovation has so much success in this field despite the enormous complexities.
Why is this candidate a good fit for 40 under 40?
Kelsey is a driven professional with fifteen years of healthcare experience identifying opportunities and solving business problems in innovative ways. She is a driven, collaborative, and solutions oriented professional with a passion for the mission of making healthcare work better. At a healthcare organization with 350,000 unique patients, 230,000 health plan members, and 13,000 employees; Kelsey is practiced at bringing innovation to rural healthcare in creative ways. She has a deep understanding of provider, staff, and patient needs based on experience researching with the end-user, informing health system strategy, and implementing large-scale initiatives. Her diverse experiences with design thinking, healthcare operations, and rigorous academic study provide a well-rounded knowledge of healthcare’s complex systems. Kelsey evangelizes the benefits and need for innovation. With increasing market pressures and complexity in healthcare, it is more important than ever to find ways to provide distinct value to customers and create seamless services, and service transitions, that improve the experience of health care and ultimately promote health. Innovation cannot succeed in a vacuum and must involve diverse, highly engaged parties to succeed. This is an incredibly high bar for healthcare where burnout is rampant and the immense complexities in healthcare promote siloed work. Knowing we cannot improve the patient experience at the cost of her coworkers’ experience, Kelsey empowers teams with tools to think differently about the services they provide. She has been successful in improving business performance by bringing a human-centric approach and design thinking framework to deliver exceptional products, services, and experiences. In her role reporting to the Chief Information and Digital Officer, Kelsey is a catalyst for organizational change through orchestrating opportunities to engage front line employees. Just this month, she is standing up the first-ever Innovation Summit at Marshfield Clinic where people from across the health system will gather and be provided with the tools to brainstorm, refine, and directly test ideas to solve some of the organization’s biggest challenges. Opportunities like these allow ideas to be translated into tangible value that energizes employees and create a lasting cultural shift.
Explain this candidate’s professional accomplishments:
Kelsey currently guides the Design and Innovation teams at Marshfield Clinic Health System in creating customer value through viable, feasible, and desirable services. As a strategic design leader, she is focused on enabling care transformation through empowering employees and improving the customer experience. Academically, Kelsey is a continual learner. She holds a Masters in Healthcare Administration from the University of Minnesota's School of Public Health as well as certificates in User Experience Design from the Nielsen Norman Group and a Six Sigma Black Belt from the American Society for Quality. Kelsey combines this knowledge with real world experience infusing innovative practices into health systems to create impactful solutions to business problems. Years spent on the front line of healthcare through volunteering as a National Ski Patroller, as a home health aide, and managing the front office at an outpatient mental health clinic provide Kelsey insight into the reality of direct patient care in a variety of settings. As a leader, she creates an environment of high engagement and productivity with top tier employee engagement results. She leads a collaborative, high-functioning team of five spanning specialties of research, design and analytics. Team achievements in 2022 include 90 hours of patient and member interviews, 108 hours of usability testing, 25k A/B test participants, and over 6k survey responses to solve for critical business needs. Kelsey is driven by curiosity, empathy, and a desire to improve our collective health. This is evident when she takes on speaking opportunities at conferences, webinars, and podcasts to share knowledge on both successes and barriers to innovating in healthcare.
How does the candidate show commitment to the industry and bettering their professional career?
Kelsey exemplifies innovative thinking, including how she approaches her career and dedication to healthcare. She engages with professionals across industries to pull best practices and infuses these into both the experience of receiving healthcare as a patient and the experience of delivering healthcare as an employee. This level of innovation requires a shift in thinking. On every project, Kelsey and her team involve stakeholders directly in the work including observing patient interviews. This provides teams across the organization a foundational and salient understanding of the barriers encountered by the patient or other end-user of their services. Healthcare has historically taken a paternal approach to patient care by telling people what is best for them rather than engaging in a personalized approach that ensures their care plan is feasible and desirable for that individual. This method of encouraging empathy with patients that have diverse needs and preferences is central to her work. In an organization with 3.7 million annual patient encounters, it is essential to design for the experiences of diverse communities, including the traditionally underrepresented voices. This is how we can help build fundamentally healthier communities. To enable health in our increasingly complex healthcare environment, it is key to understand who we are serving and have scalable ways of delivering each person’s care in a personalized way. Kelsey has shown an ability to do just that, take the complexities of delivering care and create innovative solutions utilizing a multitude of tools including emerging technologies and a relentless focus on the customer. One example is combining the many district sources of information for patients into a well-designed patient facing mobile app. Kelsey’s team conducts iterative research and design for both the care delivery and health plan mobile apps. In 2022, this work resulted in 25 released features, across the two apps each with over 20k monthly active users. This is just one channel in an omnichannel strategy to meet patients where they are comfortable so they can reliably interact with their healthcare system how, where, and when they need it. As healthcare continues to become more complex at an exponential rate, it is the innovative thinking Kelsey exemplifies that will allow the industry to improve how the healthcare industry provides services to patients and even how we define what those healthcare services are.
