Sonia Panigrahy: Designing a Patient-Centered Health System

Welcome to Octavia's Cure.

I'm Dr. Stella Safo, and today we're talking about something healthcare systems say all the time, but still struggle to consistently build: care that's truly designed around people and that really centers individuals in reaching their health goals.

We often hear phrases like patient-centered care, health equity, healthcare transformation, but too often those ideas sometimes stay at the level of language and theory instead of becoming real in the lives of patients, especially patients that are navigating some of the greatest barriers.

If we want better out- outcomes, we have to ask better questions like, "Who is this system actually designed and working for? Who's being left out? And what would change if we designed healthcare with people instead of simply delivering care to them in mind?" That's why I'm glad to be joined by Sonia Panagrahí.

Sonia is a public health strategist whose work sits at the intersection of healthcare operations, human-centered design, and health equity.

She spent years helping organizations understand not only what the data says, but also what people's lived experiences reveal about where care breakdowns happen and how to build something better together.

[upbeat music] So Sonia, welcome to Octavia's Cure.

Thank you.

Uh, I appreciate you inviting me to have this conversation.

I'm so excited to have you because we hear these terms a lot, and I use them a lot, and I'm, I live in this world, right? And sometimes I'll be talking with patients, and I just get the sense like, wow, patients don't realize how much of design work is happening around them and how often they're being kinda left out of that.

So before we jump into all of this, I would love to have you describe to us what all the different parts of your career are.

This public health part, this human-centered design part, healthcare transformation.

Just in like everyday language, what does that mean? Just tell us a little, a little bit about your career journey.