Colleen Clark

Staff UX Researcher

Colleen Clark has over a decade of experience designing and studying complex healthcare services for providers, patients, public health organizations, and health systems. Her career spans academic medical centers, startups, nonprofits, and federal research programs, where she has led ethnographic research, co-design initiatives, and large-scale service transformations—from hospital-at-home models and oncology care delivery to vaccine outreach programs and mental health platforms.

Across roles at Ariadne Labs, Talkiatry, Partners In Health, AARP Foundation, and the NIH, Colleen has built evidence-driven strategies that translate user insight into measurable impact. She is passionate about embedding research deeply into product and service teams, ensuring that empathy, rigor, and real-world constraints shape technology that improves access, equity, and outcomes in healthcare.

A DESIGN INSPIRATION

One influence that continues to shape how I think about healthcare technology is Being Mortal by Atul Gawande. The book reframes care as a system that should optimize for dignity, goals, and quality of life—not just clinical metrics. That lens has profound implications for technology design: how goals-of-care are captured, how decision aids surface tradeoffs, and how workflows support nuanced conversations rather than rushing past them.

What resonates most is the book’s insistence on designing for uncertainty and human priorities. It challenges product teams to build tools that make values visible, support shared decision-making, and respect the complexity of real clinical relationships. That systems-level thinking—where interfaces, policies, data models, and services work together to support better outcomes—is central to how I approach healthcare research and product strategy today.