Innovation for Busy Clinicians
About the courses
medDesign offers courses in Design Thinking to teach you the mindsets, methods, and tools used by the world's most innovative companies. Our modules allow busy clinicians to develop their creativity and problem-solving skills on their own time.
Free Module: Art, Heart, and Healing
Module 01: Empathy
Module 02: Creativity
Course Outcomes
Who Should Take Our Courses
Solve persistent healthcare problems
Spearhead innovation initiatives
Lead change in your organization
Expand your skillset and mindset
Become a Design Thinker - dates & cost
Meet your Design Coaches
Kahren is a dynamic force in the realm of UX, consumer research, and Design Thinking. With over 15 years of professional expertise, she specializes in harnessing market research and UX methods to unlock comprehensive development opportunities and strategic decisions. Her work is pivotal in crafting user experiences across diverse sectors, including healthcare, pharma, retail, financial services, and more.
Kahren’s approach is centered around translating mixed-method research insights into actionable strategies, ensuring that products and services not only meet but exceed market and human needs. She is a purveyor of innovation, guiding brands and campaigns to align with optimized end-to-end experiences.
In her personal time, Kahren is an avid explorer of new ideas and concepts, always seeking to expand her horizons and apply her learnings in practical, impactful ways. You may also find her at any given time playing with her cats, watching a new show, spending time with her husband, and listening to new music.
Ty is the Founder and Principal of our award winning design firm, Trig. He has spent the last 15 years supporting entrepreneurial teams and studying the essential ingredients for success. As a service provider, Trig offers a unique combination of insights and ideation, product design, brand, and digital development capabilities that are essential to helping healthcare companies achieve transformative design.
As a career industrial designer and innovation practitioner, Ty has managed hundreds of new product development programs through the process of opportunity identification guided to commercialization. He started his career as an intrapreneur within Home Depot, first joining as an Olympic-hopeful sponsored athlete. He demonstrated to senior executives the value of creating new product development capabilities within the retailer – then on to lead the portfolio of internal new product programs.
Ty is also a proud father and husband that loves the outdoors and sharing this passion with his family. While he has a love for kayaking the rapids of North Carolina, he will happily spend his day by the lake taking in the views and teaching his kids how to fish.
Kelly is the Architect of our med+Design coursework where she delivers a curriculum that not only drives medical innovation but meets the needs of the practitioners that we serve. Natural curiosity about the world fuels her to uncover the physical, cultural, and environmental forces that shape people’s lives. Connecting the seemingly unrelated dots to inspire new product opportunities is Kelly's sweet spot. While she's comfortable living in the fuzzy front-end, she strives to help others push their creativity threshold as well. This unique expertise has led her to educate the next generation of innovators their journey of creating novel patient-centered solutions.
A constant explorer in both her professional and personal life, on any given weekend you can find her on adventures throughout Los Angeles to the beach, hiking trails, or a tasty new restaurant. She loves bringing her dog out to the fun as well and continually creating art in various mediums including pottery and drawing.
Don’t take our word for it
We weren't focused on the outcome as much as the process. It was human focused over monetary. Every week we iterated closer to what the true solution for our stakeholders was. Ty’s team was amazing in facilitating those conversations while our team was driving the solution.
There are not many opportunities to identify that there is a problem with something and be able to nurture solutions to it. Walking through it step by step to identify the stakeholders, discover their needs and wants, and basing a solution off of that made this workshop a very unique and worthwhile experience.
After going through the Empathy and Creativity phases, our work that was pulled out of text and put into prototype pictures was proof to funding agencies that we have done the work in the pre-award phase to understand the needs of our stakeholders. We used this proof in three grants and have already been awarded one of the three from this outside the box approach.
A huge thank you to Kelly for her fantastic storyboard illustrations which perfectly described how our device concept will be used by the patient and provider. The images were so well done and told the story of our device so clearly… we were really blown away!
I really liked having feedback from the other clinical teams during the workshop. It’s really fun to hear from people who have no idea what we’re working on, just to see what they come up with.
Huge thanks to Ty and Kelly. My colleague Nick and I came into this with a general idea of a clinical problem and some notions of solutions but all of it was kind of nebulous. Ty and Kelly helped us break it down, re-conceptualize, and then rebuild this into a better articulated problem and far more robust solution (with fantastic visuals - thanks Kelly!).
The coaching between sessions was invaluable. Our project wouldn't have come together without that individual coaching from Trig. The pacing of the workshop was perfect for what we need as providers to both stay involved, yet not take too much time away from seeing patients.
Having the opportunity to see how our project would interact with clinical problems - in real time - made the problem solving process so much more tangible.
This is awesome! I can confidently speak for everyone else that this has been an eye-opening experience. While you can't measure creativity, I have felt my personal creative confidence grow as a result of this workshop. There was a fun reveal at the end where everyone brings their best version of the idea after a period of stealth mode to say, "Check this out!".
About us
We believe that good design is good for healthcare. medDesign was created in partnership with UNC’s FastTraCS program to offer essential training to empower your entrepreneurial journey.
Since our inception, we have hosted the medDesign Podcast. A platform where we showcase the stories of the brightest minds in healthcare, innovation, and entrepreneurship. Our esteemed guests help to lay the foundation for how we can all work towards creating a better future for patients, providers, and the greater healthcare industry.
Trig is an award-winning industrial design firm serving the consumer, healthcare, and durable goods markets. Our comprehensive innovation process includes insights and ideation, brand and digital, and classic product design for start-ups, mid-sized, and Fortune 500 companies across the United States. Based in Chapel Hill, the Trig® product design consulting team can be found in Chapel Hill, Raleigh, Knoxville, and Los Angeles.