Senior leader using art and science to improve health outcomes at scale
Senior leader at the intersection of art and science improving health outcomes at scale
About me
I am the Vice President of Behavior Change & Design at Cityblock Health, where I lead interdisciplinary insights, design, and engagement teams to create trust-based experiences for complex member care. I am accountable for board-level experience metrics and lead cross-functional teams in the design, testing, and implementation of agentic-AI texting and dozens of omni-channel behavioral interventions.
Previously, I was the founding Director of the Design & Innovation Lab at CVS Health. There, I tested and scaled patient engagement programs to drive medication adherence, vaccine uptake, and health equity across digital, SMS, and in-store channels—resulting in $80M in incremental run rate margin over five years.
Beyond my work with Fortune 10 and VC-backed startups, my experience spans global health leadership in India and East Africa, partnering with policymakers, multi-lateral institutions, and community-based organizations to solve systemic challenges.
Outside of work, I enjoy keeping up with my littles, jogging with my rascal dog, and traveling with a good book in tow.
My expertise
Case studies
Re-imagining Net Promoter Score: Designing the patent-pending Trust Index
A purpose built consumer experience measurement for marginalized populations and value-based care
Business problem: Traditional customer experience metrics, such as Net Promoter Score (NPS), are often insufficient in healthcare. They fail to account for the power imbalances and historical distrust that prevent vulnerable communities from engaging in care—a challenge central to Cityblock’s mission. We needed a new measure of experience rooted in trust to drive long-term behavior change.
Design process: In 18 months I led our teams to build a new measurement framework through iterative, patient-centric research. By testing surveys with members and lookalike audiences and building upon clinical gold standards, we developed a proprietary Trust Index that assesses four key dimensions of trust and their primary drivers. We prioritized valid measurement, operational feasibility, and business actionability.
Our data strategy captures feedback not just after clinical interactions, but also during “quiet periods” between visits to build a truly honest, 360- degree picture of patient relationships. The tool is purpose-built for low-literacy and BIPOC populations who are traditionally excluded from standard feedback loops
.Result The patent-pending Trust Index has replaced NPS at Cityblock and is now a board-level executive metric. We collect about 1.5k-2k trust impressions a quarter. It is fully integrated into annual planning, monthly OKR reviews, and frontline QA playbooks reaching 1k colleagues. Most importantly, the data proves that user experience and trust are leading indicators of clinical success: members with high trust scores show 10-15% higher visit completion rates, better retention, and 30% increased reachability.
The Trust Index is proprietary and confidential to Cityblock Health
Content experiences that drive health behavior change
Behaviorally designed SMS content drive health outcomes and reduce costs at scale
Business problem: Healthcare often relies on high cost specialized labor to “educate” patients in a single conversation only for patients to forget that info in the context of their everyday life.
Design process: I use patient voice, low stakes testing and experiments, and behavioral science to make engagement omnichannel and reach patients at the right time.
Example result: A well timed kit with useful objects like a cued thermometer led to a 20% increase in urgent care at home market share for Cityblock.
Example result:Behaviorally informed texts with timely education and videos improve medication adherence by 10-20% and click through rates of 35% for commercially insured and Medicaid populations at CVS and Cityblock
Leadership: Transforming insights and design in the age of AI
A system-level redesign that aligned talent, tools, and culture to deliver high-impact outcomes with greater efficiency.
Business problem: The insights and design organization lacked a unified vision, operating as disparate teams with competing goals and redundant workflows. Variable standards for quality and apprehension toward AI created friction. The department required a complete transformation into a unified, future-focused group capable of working more flexibly.
Organization design strategy:I led the organizational redesign centered on four strategic pillars:
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Clarity: I aligned the team under a singular mission and rewrote job descriptions at every level to ensure accountability
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Operational Excellence: I introduced new rituals and systems to eliminate silos and reinforce agile ways of working
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Future-Proofing: I established AI tool adoption and systems-thinking as non-negotiable competencies
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Positive reinforcement: I publicly recognize early adopters and celebrate those modeling the new behaviors.
Result This transformation is a dynamic process that has already yielded measurable gains. By optimizing the talent density —elevating highpotential junior colleagues and refining performance standards—the team now delivers the same high- impact results with optimized headcount spend. Our employee engagement scores now exceed those of Product Management, Engineering, and Operations, proving that a high-accountability culture can also be a satisfied one.
Transforming patient experience through agentic AI
Radically caring agentic AI that supports hospital discharge care, co-designed with patients
Business Problem: Patient engagement at Cityblock historically relies on cold outreach, which suffers from low reach and high operational costs. While Agentic-AI text messaging offered a path toward personalized, low-cost engagement, we faced a “Trust Gap”: both Medicaid members and internal clinical stakeholders were deeply skeptical.
Design Process: I chose a high-value but low-stakes entry point: messaging members following an unsuccessful outreach attempt after a hospital discharge. My approach focused on:
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Standards & safety: I developed rigorous tone-of-voice, safety, and experience standards, aligning clinical leadership.
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Stakeholder buy-in: I partnered with AI engineering to create “sandbox” prototypes, allowing clinicians to test the AI
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Member voice: We conducted iterative testing with our Member Advisory Council, ensuring the AI’s communication style felt supportive rather than “robotic” to our most skeptical members.
Results: The pilot resulted in a 15% member reply rate with 5 messages on average in each conversation; 0 safety or experience issues reported.; and 15 percentage-point improvement in delivering critical post-discharge care. Based on these results, Agentic AI engagement has been integrated into Cityblock’s 2026 Care Model Strategy and core product roadmap.
Simplifying UX: Reducing opex and improving business value
UX strategy that reduces cognitive load and removes steps to user value
Business problem: Cityblock’s frontline software to power patient care is cluttered from competing and outdated features from quickly changing product strategies. This results in unnecessarily long and frictionful user journeys. In 2025 I introduced a UX theme of “reducing low value information and enabling focus” to begin addressing this problem
Example: The example on the right shows the amount of low value information reduced from a single page that care teams use when checking in with patients over the phone.
Result Users spent less time searching through low value information and were more likely to address business critical opportunities in phone call interactions
Brand: Optimizing messengers for trust and follow through
Why choosing the right messenger for the right message has outsize impact
Business problem: The messenger is as important as the message itself. Identical information can yield different outcomes depending on who delivers it. Brands must identify the specific “ambassadors” who can inspire action with priority groups.
Design process: I lead teams in using lookalike testing, behavioral interviews, and experiments to identify the optimal messenger for every touchpoint. This goes beyond assumptions to find the “Trust-Levers” that resonate
Cityblock: Through lookalike testing, we evaluated dozens of potential brand ambassadors. We discovered that the image of our founder, Dr. Toyin Ajayi, in a clinical white coat, inspired significantly higher baseline trust.
CVS: While pharmacists are typically CVS’s most trusted messengers, our research during the COVID vaccine rollout revealed a new opportunity. For Black and Brown communities, we found that young adults (18-25) and faith leaders were the most effective catalysts for senior vaccination. We pivoted our national strategy to empower these groups, increasing vaccine uptake.
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