Engagements
Too many products and clinical innovations are designed looking backward: without the environment people actually work in, or the aspirations of patients, clinicians, caregivers, administrators, and payers. I balance user strategy, behavioral insight, design, and technology to solve those human problems, designing the answers into the product rather than onto it.
How I Help:
- Evidence-based intervention design. Interventions built on the literature, behavioral science, and user research, to improve engagement and outcomes.
- Behavioral and user strategy for adoption, engagement, and retention. Strategies that earn trust and hold it, across healthcare systems and digital platforms.
- End-to-end design of products, services, or systems. Healthcare products, digital solutions, services, and systems, from strategy through implementation and adoption.
- Corporate innovation culture and structure. The culture, structures, and capabilities organizations need to turn innovation into scalable solutions.
ApproachDesign for adoption, built around human emotion
My methodology is the product of scar tissue earned on the bleeding edge of emerging technologies.
Games taught me that people choose agency, emotion, and story over technology. Healthcare is where I rebuilt that around how people act when trust and lives are on the line: find the emotional currencies that bring them back, design those into the foundation rather than onto the surface, and tune the whole thing against real users before anyone commits.
In the early days of CG and consoles, I bent technology to my stubborn will, then built the teams to exploit it at scale, shipping more than twenty titles that sold over a million units. Then I started asking: Why? As in, Why would anyone choose to play a game instead of watching a movie? People choose agency, emotion, storytelling, and problem-solving over technology. That hasn't changed in decades, across every platform shift I've worked through.
The turn came when I saw it isn't gamification. It's the agency, emotion, and stories that move people, whether the stakes are entertainment or a diagnosis. Each engagement starts with discovery. A client's view of the problem is constrained by where they sit, and that perspective rarely reveals the whole opportunity. From there I look for the non-financial, emotional currencies that motivate people to return, and build the product around them. Engagement designed into the foundation, not added at the end, is what drives clinical adoption, cuts friction, and improves lives.
Every design is tuned through fast cycles of prototyping and user research before anyone commits to it. Research will tell you what people did. Knowing which of it matters, and which pattern from another field can be bent to fit, is the interpretation, and that comes from experience.
Capabilities
Engine Co. 4, my consultancy, has run engagements for the Fortune 5, startups, national associations, and NGOs for 15+ years. It isn't a traditional firm. It's a consortium of specialists I've worked alongside for a career, so you get the people the problem needs and nobody else: solo when a startup needs speed, a full team when an enterprise needs firepower. My network includes:
- Design & Creative: Interaction, game, and production designers, character animators, directors, and product strategists
- AI & Engineering: AI/ML and reinforcement learning specialists, CTOs, and technical directors
- User Behavior & Research: Cognitive psychologists, performance psychologists, behavioral economists, and social anthropologists
- Clinical & Domain: Physicians, mental health clinicians, and counterterrorism specialists
Everything in service of one goal: adoption and retention that make markets.
