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Jann Gao earned her undergraduate and graduate degrees in industrial engineering before starting her healthcare career at Montefiore Health System as a healthcare business process architect focusing on improving patient and clinical workflow. Over time, she transitioned into working for firms before joining CannonDesign as senior consultant of Health Advisory Services before transitioning over to Blue Cottage of CannonDesign (their consulting arm) as lead strategy and data analyst in 2019.
Gao has employed analytical and detailed thinking in her work, leading teams of consultants in order to address not only immediate client issues but also larger societal and community concerns. Within the past several years, she has held key roles as integrated project manager on two projects in St. Louis: New Mercy Ballas Outpatient Center project and University of Michigan Health-West (formerly Metro Health) system-wide master plan. As the strategy and analytics lead for the University of Kentucky system-wide facilities plan, she assisted Kentucky’s premier academic medical center in expanding beyond its main campus into additional clinic footprints to enhance accessibility for surrounding communities. Jann assisted the client in defining their ideal presence within their community – from services to locations. Furthermore, she pioneered a new model of collaboration and project management between CannonDesign and Blue Cottage; through this work she ensured positive collaboration through dashboards which tracked team progress as well as keeping clients up-to-date and making decisions through consensus.
Devoted to improving and innovating healthcare, she recently joined forces with other leaders from healthcare to develop and prototype the Facility Sizing and Concept Design Tool, or FASTDesign. Employing an integrated methodology, FASTDesign brings the facility sizing, planning, concept development processes into one automated, holistic tool while streamlining connectivity between parametric models and sizing to help visualize data-driven decisions visually.
As one of this year’s Rising Stars, Gao cites healthcare design as a rewarding career that allows her to be involved with turning a vision into reality with tangible outcomes that bring pleasure. She finds this work particularly gratifying.
Path to Healthcare Design: I have always been deeply curious about myself and the world. One way that helps satisfy this curiosity is through reading other people’s work, engaging with talents in various industries, seeking new project experiences, connecting dots along the way – this led me directly into healthcare design! From an education in industrial engineering to working for health systems and multiple design firms; healthcare design allows me to be involved with creating visions into reality with impactful results, which makes the experience immensely satisfying and gratifying for me personally.
Explain Your Design Approach: Team-based and Human-Driven, Leading by Example, Being Curious and Asking Hard Questions are all strategies used in my design approach.
On your desk right now: several facilities master planning projects where I provide project management and data analytics expertise for sprawling academic medical campuses that demand immense coordination and communication given their complexity and ever-evolving healthcare landscape. Clients expect efficiency as well as processes that bring better experiences to patients and staff alike, so my work involves gathering perspectives from all sides before providing recommendations that satisfy everyone’s needs – it’s like piecing together a puzzle whose pieces keep shifting shape!
Most rewarding project: University of Kentucky is an academic medical center focused on expanding specialty care within their surrounding community. I served as strategy and analytics lead for this large project and also initiated new methods of collaboration among workstreams that made this massive endeavor more manageable while helping the client identify areas for expansion.
What success means to me: Success for me means not only discovering and developing my potential in work and passion, but also inviting others to work alongside me to realize their life potential.
Industry Challenge You Observe: My primary industry challenge would be increasing diversity of talent who each have equal voices and influences over how we approach work and solutions. Unfortunately, what the industry needs now are more creative perspectives to solve one of humanity’s major issues: maximization of collective human potential through solutions that bring health and wellness for all.
Healthcare designers today must possess an essential ability: Being able to question whether we are solving the right problems and redefine them with more long-term solutions in mind.
New pandemic-inspired work habit: Reaching out and connecting with people even if we don’t work on similar projects or initiatives. People are at the core of life – they bring inspirations, stories, ideas and solutions; simply by reaching out and speaking to others I gain so much in this process.
