Paradigm Health
A growth model for a boutique practice that did not want to lose the care that made it.
Paradigm Health is a boutique practice built on relationship-driven care, founded by two physicians who know every patient. They asked how smart technology could give their doctors more time with them. I led the whole engagement: the journey and workflows that say how the practice works, four frameworks to grow it by, and a clickable vision of the doctor's day.
Highlights
- One journey for patients, staff and doctors, and the gap it exposed
- The practice's workflows codified before any technology was chosen
- Four frameworks, in order, as the operating model for growth
- A doctor's day prototyped, with the AI as decision support
- An ask for smarter tools, answered with an operating model
The ask
Paradigm Health had built care that feels continuous and personal. Patients are understood inside the practice rather than passed through it, and the two physicians who founded it know each one. The founders wanted to grow, toward more clinicians and more locations, and their brief was technology: supercharge the doctors with smart tools so they could spend more time on patients.
Discovery ran inside the practice: a kickoff workshop with the founders and the team, interviews with patients and staff, a day as a patient from intake to metabolic testing, and three surveys that baselined the practice on satisfaction, efficiency and outcomes. It found the problem was structural. The quality lived in specific people and the way they worked, none of it written down. Add patients, clinicians or a second location, and it is the first thing to break.
I treated the brief as a hypothesis. The practice's best work had to be codified before any technology could carry it, so the frameworks came first and the AI followed from them.
The Paradigm Journey
The journey maps seven stages from awareness to advocacy across three lanes at once, patients, staff and doctors, because a practice at scale is three people living the same moment. Each cell holds the touchpoints that stage needs, ranked for what to build first. The most useful thing on it is a gap: at engagement, the doctors' lane is empty, which is where the founders' time was going and where the technology had the most to give back.
From the journey came the workflows: the touchpoints ranked by impact, the redundant tasks named for automation, and the moments where a doctor's attention had to be protected. Those workflows are what the frameworks and the prototype were built to serve.
Four frameworks
The frameworks are the operating model, and they run in order: map the journey and choose the touchpoints; build the technology that automates the redundant work and gives staff room; give staff intuitive tools and patients care plans they can act on; then align tasks, people, structure and culture so the practice can grow without diluting the care. Three principles were agreed with the founders before any of it: purpose before technology, simplicity over complexity, measured impact.
The proof of concept
The vision made the frameworks clickable. A doctor's command center for the day: the AI-surfaced task list with the urgent items flagged, the schedule, and a patient summary that gathers the history, the latest results and the goals before the visit. During the visit, an AI that listens and drafts the note, so the doctor looks at the patient rather than the screen. For patients, a virtual check-in that tells them what the first visit holds and what to bring, and results they can read. Every one of those is decision support; the judgment stays with the clinician.
What the founders received was their own practice written down: a journey they could point to, four frameworks that say how it works, and a doctor's day with the paperwork lifted off it.
Vision and strategy work; nothing was built to production. The founders left with a plan they could commit to.
A Format-3 engagement. A product designer worked alongside me part of the time, and a motion designer on the proof of concept.
“You have given us a truly beautiful gift of helping us vision our business and shape us for the future. Your understanding of our practice and industry expertise formed an amazing partnership.”
