Designed to Heal: Find Your Performative Progress Gap
Every healthcare leader is being asked to do two things at once: cut cost and raise quality. Fewer staff, more throughput, better outcomes, lower spend. Most organizations respond the same way, with another initiative, another dashboard, another round of reporting on the effort.
And the squeeze does not let up, because the problem is not effort. The problem is the distance between what your organization says it values and what it has actually built into budgets, workflows, staffing, and decision rights. That distance has a name: the Performative Progress Gap. It is where the money leaks. Rework, turnover, preventable harm, leaders' hours spent reporting progress instead of building it: that is the gap, invoiced.
You cannot fix the cost and quality squeeze until you can see your gap. Finding it is the beginning.
In this 90-minute working session, Dr. Nneka Sederstrom walks you through the Designed to Heal framework, and you will score your own organization live using the Designed to Heal scoring tool: once on what your organization says, once on what it has built. You will leave knowing your widest gap, why it is there, and what to build first, because that is where cost and quality stop being opponents and start being the same project.
What we will do together:
The framework, briefly: seven design specifications a system built to heal has to meet, and the two scores every organization carries.
Your score, live: complete the scoring tool during the session, with guidance on scoring the building and not the belief.
Reading your gap: what a wide gap on each specification actually looks like from the inside, and why gaps close two ways, by building more or by saying less.
What to build first: the first 30 days of a 90-day build, starting from your widest gap.
Bring: one artifact your organization circulates (a dashboard, a board report, a quality summary) and two honest sentences about where your staff feel the gap most.
Who this is for: healthcare executives, clinical leaders, quality and safety leaders, and anyone who has sat in a room where the reported numbers and the lived experience did not match.
About Dr. Sederstrom: Dr. Nneka Sederstrom, PhD, MPH, MA, FCCP, FCCM, is a healthcare executive and clinical ethicist, co-founder of UzObi, Inc., and author of the forthcoming book Designed to Heal. She has led ethics and health equity at the bedside and in the boardroom for more than twenty years.