In a room full of healthcare veterans, experience design and management student Emily Weber challenged herself to speak up. Weber, a senior at the BYU Marriott School of Business, says it's important to push herself to grow—even when she feels inexperienced, intimidated, or uncertain.
By 2023, Weber had almost finished a minor in healthcare leadership and was on the lookout for an ideal major to pair with it. She was interested in many business programs, but ExDM caught her attention the most. As she began progressing through the program, she received unsettling news: She needed surgery.
“I’m the worst patient in the whole world,” Weber laughs. She describes feeling terrified throughout the entire preparation and operation process. But, after her procedure, she felt pleasantly surprised, as she’d discovered an increased ability to empathize with the patient experience. “That’s the side of healthcare I want to do.”
A few months later, with a newfound understanding of herself and her career goals, Weber was accepted into the ExDM program and immediately began her search for an internship. After hours of networking, résumé writing, and applying, she landed a year-long position at Intermountain Health, interning under the Spanish Fork hospital’s CEO.
Weber set a goal to learn as much as possible from her first opportunity to work alongside professional healthcare staff. “It’s really hard to understand how the system works without shadowing everyone.” So, she spent a majority of her time in the first months tagging along with hospital employees performing various tasks.
She worked alongside facilities staff to understand how they keep the building up to code. She followed culinary workers to see how their efforts interlocked with patient and employee well-being. She witnessed an entire birth, with an epidural injection, to realize the scope of the hospital’s involvement in maternity services. And she even found herself on the other side of the surgeon’s table, putting on scrubs and watching a complete knee replacement.
As a result of each experience, Weber says she gained confidence in her experience design approach to healthcare. “The facility is just so much more complex than you might think, and there’s so many people involved,” she says. “And the work I love in healthcare is process efficiency and strategy.”
When managers mentioned potential inefficiencies in the hospital’s processes, Weber would try to speak up at their leadership meetings with her own creative input. “In ExDM classes, we learn to build off of each other’s ideas,” she explains. “As you throw those out, you’re contributing to the psychological safety and creating more of an opportunity for the best ideas to come to the table.”
Weber admits that adding to the conversation felt uncomfortable at first. She even recalls skittishly weighing her minimal experience against the managers and surgeons in the room, but she believed in what she learned in her ExDM classes. Because she spoke up, Weber says, “I can say, with one thousand percent certainty, that the hospital is looking for every nitpicky option to make things faster for patients, to make things less painful for them, and to make things cheaper for them.”
Part of her duties included designing and gathering content for the weekly employee newsletter to notify hospital staff about workplace updates. “Leadership makes changes based off of survey results, and not only do we have to make changes, but we have to make sure that the caregivers understand that we made changes, and they feel like they are heard,” Weber says.
After she graduates in April, Weber plans to build on her current skills and earn a master’s degree in healthcare administration. “In the long term, I just love the problem-solving aspect of experience design, and I love the working-with-people aspect of it,” she says.
Her love for the role continually motivates her to take on the difficult parts of healthcare with a learning mindset, Weber explains. “Even though being at the hospital is sometimes people’s worst days,” she says, “there’s so much good in managing their experiences.”
