Profiles in Impact: Kaitlyn Paulsen

Kaitlyn  graduated from Harvey Mudd in 2022 with a degree in engineering. She spent the next year as a Watson Fellow, pursuing a self-designed independent exploration of how healthcare organizations in 8 different countries prioritize “caring over curing.” Currently, she is a Senior Analyst at Oak Street Health, where she designs ways to improve the patient experience across a network of senior primary care clinics.

I was a couple of years into an engineering major at Mudd, and I already knew I didn’t love it the way people around me did. We got an assignment to “Create a device to help older adults play cornhole,” so we went out and did interviews at a nearby senior center. And the people there were like, We do not want this. Cornhole is one of the few things we can still do. There was a woman there who was deaf and blind and using a walker, and she still played. But we had to complete the assignment that was on the syllabus, so we built it anyway.

Human-centered design is the opposite. Your job is to fall in love with the problem: figure out what’s really going on, what people really need. And then solve that problem—not the one you’re good at solving. At the Hive, they kept pushing me to think about the range of stakeholders my solution needed to serve—to wrap my head around the whole messy ecosystem. They showed me a way of working that was as rigorous and complex as engineering, but a lot more human. And human was what I wanted to get better at.

Empathy is what takes you out of your expertise and into the reality of the people you’re trying to help. We prepped this list of questions to understand how people with brain tumors navigate the care system—insurance, diagnosis, all that. And the person we were interviewing told us a story about the fancy sportscar he’d rented to take his kid on a trip. We’d wanted to talk about what it was like for him to be a caregiver. But that’s not who he was. He was a dad, and what mattered more than anything else was his daughter. 

As part of her HCD thesis, I’d done a video with Anya Zimmerman-Smith for the Neuro-Oncology Department at UCSF. They have this ritual where the whole medical team—administrators, social workers, oncologists, nurses—comes together to recognize the lives of patients who’ve passed away. It gives them a way to honor the patients, and let go part of what’s so hard about working everyday with the terminally ill. 

We showed that video at the Hive, and it led to another project with the Marks Family Camp, for families where a parent has a brain tumor. As we learned more about the camp, we realized that the doctors never got a chance to talk to the kids: they’d talk to the patient with the tumor, and the spouse who was their caregiver, but not the child whose life had also been turned upside down by this disease.

So we set up a space where the kids could actually ask their questions. Some were light—but some were brutal. One kid asked if they had caused the tumor. Another asked why their dad had gotten cancer a second time, when they were supposed to have been cured already. One kid asked what it was like for the doctor when they can’t save somebody. 

When you look hard at any complex system, you find people inside it whose needs are getting missed. At Oak Street, where I work now, a lot of my job is basically listening for the friction. What are patients confused by? What hard things are staff dealing with? What language is quietly making things worse? How might we smooth out these points of friction? 

I still love the complexity, the hard problems that pulled me into engineering. But the Hive showed me that rigor and empathy are not opposites. If anything, the more human the problem is, the more precise you have to be.

written by Dan Coleman

published by Salina Muñoz