Northwell
Health

Role

Director, UX & Creative Direction, reporting to the CMO.

Team

Joined as one of two designers. Grew the team to fifteen-plus across UX, product, DesignOps, brand and research.

Timeline

2014–2022. Senior Designer → Lead → Manager → Director: three promotions in eight years.

What I owned

The enterprise design system, northwell.edu end-to-end, and creative direction across digital, print, video, motion and wayfinding.

Outcome

37 properties unified into one system, 5× lower content creation cost, Brand NPS 12.9 → 25.2.

I joined Northwell Health in 2014 as one of two designers. Over eight years, I grew from Senior Designer to Director of UX, ultimately reporting directly to the CMO and owning the creative vision for one of the largest health systems on the East Coast. What started as a digital UX mandate expanded to encompass the full Northwell brand experience: digital, print, video, motion, wayfinding, and the enterprise design system that unified 37 previously disconnected hospital and outpatient properties.

By the time I left in 2022, Northwell had a mature, system-wide design practice it didn't have when I arrived, an enterprise design system governing every brand touchpoint, and northwell.edu serving as the unified digital front door for one of the largest health systems on the East Coast. Brand NPS rose from 12.9 to 25.2, and a 5× drop in content creation costs made consistency the cheaper option, not the harder one.

North Shore-LIJ Health System was one of the largest hospital networks on the East Coast, but its digital presence didn't reflect its clinical reputation. Thirty-seven hospital and outpatient properties operated with independent websites, disconnected brand identities, and no shared design infrastructure. There was no centralized UX function. No design system. No unified patient digital experience.

The organization was rebranding to Northwell Health: a new name, a new ambition, and an expectation that the digital experience would match. The challenge was structural, not cosmetic. How do you create a consistent, trustworthy patient experience across a system the size of a small city, with no design organization to build it, in a regulated healthcare environment where every word and interaction carries clinical and legal weight?

I joined in 2014 as one of two designers, reporting to the AVP of Digital Strategy. Over eight years I progressed from Senior Designer to Lead Designer, Manager, and Director — with each step expanding both the team I led and the scope of what design owned inside the organization.

As Director of UX, I reported directly to the CMO. My mandate had grown well beyond UX. I partnered with the Creative Director and took on creative direction responsibility across the full brand experience — digital, print, brand identity, video, motion graphics, and wayfinding. I was the creative vision behind Northwell's enterprise design system and the person responsible for ensuring design consistency across every surface the organization touched.

Eight years of transformation started with a commitment to understanding the patient before designing for them. In a health system of Northwell's scale — spanning 23 hospitals and 750+ outpatient facilities with millions of patient interactions annually — the risk of designing based on assumption is high and the consequences are real.

We built a research practice that matched the complexity of the organization: deep qualitative work with patients navigating the system for the first time, journey mapping across the full care continuum, and synthesis sessions that brought clinical, operational, and digital stakeholders into the same room to align on what patients actually needed versus what the institution assumed they did.

This research foundation became the through-line for every design decision that followed. The design system, northwell.edu, and the Find a Doctor experience were all built on insights that came from that original investment in listening.

These are clinical achievements, not design ones. They're the standard the brand and digital experience had to match. During my tenure, Northwell's average CMS star rating rose from 2.2 to 3.8 and the share of its hospitals meeting national quality benchmarks went from 42% to 92%. The system won the American Hospital Association's Quest for Quality Prize in 2018, and North Shore University Hospital earned the Healthgrades Patient Safety Excellence Award four years running (2019–2022).

Eight years taught me that a design system is a people project wearing a component library. The library was the easy part. Getting 37 properties to give up their own way of doing things took research, training and a lot of patience. What I'd do differently is start the training programs earlier. Every month other teams couldn't apply the system on their own was a month design spent as the bottleneck instead of the multiplier.

I joined as one of two designers. I left as Director of UX and Creative Direction, reporting to the CMO, leading a team of fifteen-plus, and overseeing the full brand experience of a 23-hospital health system.

That arc is the real legacy — not just what I built, but what the organization could do on its own after I left, in a place where design barely had a seat at the table when I started. The design system I defined became the operating standard for every digital, print, and brand surface in the health system. northwell.edu went from a fragmented collection of 37 disconnected sites to a unified patient platform — the primary front door for millions of New Yorkers seeking care. The training programs I established gave Marketing and Multimedia teams the skills to maintain brand standards independently.