Our Origin Story
The Better Lab was founded in 2016 by Amanda Sammann, Lara Chehab, Devika Patel, and Susan Dix Lyons. Our primary goal was to take a human-centered design (HCD) approach starting with users – patients, physicians, caregivers, healthcare professionals – to understand the context of their everyday lives as we work together to identify stubborn health problems, prototype solutions and iterate quickly to see what works. Our secondary goal was to develop and promote HCD as a better understood and widely practiced methodology in academic medicine.
Since our founding, we have pioneered the usage of HCD as a rigorous and repeatable methodology across a variety of clinical settings. We have designed and implemented numerous healthcare interventions, with a specific focus on serving vulnerable patient populations.
We are located at Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital within the UCSF Department of Surgery.
Our Vision
We want to make things better. We believe that the key to improving any system begins with the people who have to navigate that system – connecting with these users meaningfully, listening and observing, and working quickly and collaboratively to test our ideas in order to fix things that frustrate and impede progress and contribute to launching a design-driven health care revolution.
“Better” means we:
Improve health outcomes
Improve user experience (satisfaction, usability, joy)
Increase value for patients and institutions (quality and cost)
Enable others to improve the system (teach the process and tell the story)
