Okay. Let's let's kick it off. Welcome, everyone, one more time. Good morning, good afternoon, good evening.I want to, bring your attention to something a little different, and, we're now having a meet and greet with one of our partners, GE Healthcare. As most of you may know, that's one of the world's leading medical technology and digital health companies with over a century of history. You may correct me, Nicole, if I'm wrong for something. From, from imaging and diagnostics to a power clinical decision support, They sit in the heart of some of the most critical moments in patient care, and they're actively shaping what the future of health care looks like. And, you know, if you ever tried to design a product for health care, you know it's unlike any other environment. The stakes are different. The constraints are different.

And the people you're designing for, clinicians, patients, administrators, often have needs that pull in completely different, directions. That's exactly where, our guest today works. Nicole de Klein is an experienced design leader with twenty years of experience in human centered innovation and as a director of customer experience and workflow strategy at GE Healthcare. She bridges the gap between what patients and clinicians actually need and what technology and operations can actually deliver. Today, she's joining us to talk about cocreation as a strategic mindset, not as a workshop exercise, but as way to build genuine clarity and trust across people, technology, and care, please give a warm welcome to Nicole in the chat. Hi, and welcome one more time.

Great. Thank you for the introduction.

You're welcome.

Good. So I will share start and share my screen. So again, indeed, good morning, good afternoon, everyone. I want to indeed start with acknowledging that health care is a very complex system to design for. I mean, the stakes are very high, the pressure is real, and every decision in there touches someone's life in a meaningful way. But in all of that complexity, the most powerful thing we can do is simply get close, listen deeply, and design with heart. And that is the thread that runs through my presentation. I'm going to share two examples of co creation with you that go beyond the sticky notes. So the high intensity co creation room we run-in the global concourses and user meetings where we quantify emotions in real time. So let me start.

Health care is fundamentally for people by people. So every new doctor promises to help those who place their trust in them. The question for us is, especially those designing digital transformation, is how do we empower that system? How do we support these clinicians so they can keep that promise under their enormous pressure they're under? And especially a system where the core where the patient is at the core of health care, their needs, their wishes, their hopes, and their fears. In every step of their journey, whether they're doing imaging, lab tests, whether they're having a consult with their health care professional, all of these touch points shape their experience. And when we talk about transforming health care, we talk about navigating all of this. And the system that I showed is changing at a speed we've never seen before.

We face soft staffing shortages, burnout, rising patient volumes, and economic pressures force hospitals to rethink their model. And that's possible because at the same time, AI, automation, robotics, genomics, digital tools, they're reshaping what's possible. Now, in all of this, when I talk with clinicians, I hear them say again and again, I would like to have more time with my patients. So one of my favorite quotes from doctor Eric Topol, advocates this really. He talks about that AI's greatest opportunity is not necessarily inefficiency, but it's restoring that connection and trust between patients and doctors. So that's the essential question I have in all my work. How do we design innovation that supports people rather than overwhelms them?

And to do that meaningfully, we can't just drop technology into the system and hope that it works for the best. We need to apply technology where it adds value and not where it adds noise. And for us, there are three principles that are shown on this slide that really guide this. It needs to be human centered. So we need to design for realities of people's works and lives. It needs to be standardized, making what works repeatable and scalable. And it needs to be cocreated, which is the essence of this talk. So we design with the ecosystem and not for it. Well, cocreation really allows us to gather many different perspectives to envision the best possible experience for both patients and staff.

And more directly, it also helps us to learn in actual context with the actual context in fast iterations. So let me introduce myself. I'm Nicole, and I've been designing for nearly twenty years. First, I started in consumer products. So maybe the toothbrush or shaver that you might use every morning could be designed by me. Later, I transitioned to health care. But all across all of that, one thing has stayed the same. Design really begins with listening. It's really trying to understand deeply what moves someone, what they struggle with, what brings them joy, and use creativity to relieve that pain or unlock the possibility of something new. And that really is what brings me to health care, to shape future experiences that support people.

Now so I work at GE Healthcare, which is a global provider of imaging systems, patient monitoring, ultrasound, diagnostic agents, and our solutions support clinicians around the world in diagnosing, treating, and monitoring patients. My work sits inside that ecosystem to help ensure the experience we design actually makes sense for the people who use them every day. And I do that in the group of experience design, which has hubs across US, Europe, and Asia. And we're a very multidisciplinary group. We have industrial designers, UX designers, visual designers, human factor engineers, design researchers, and strategists like me. So my role as director of customer experience and workflow strategy is about connecting the dots. It sits within user integration to make sure we deeply understand the needs of the users and integrate that into the designs that we make afterwards.

So in a tagline, I always say my job is to really ensure we design with people for a reality and not for assumptions. So how does my week look like? Like many of you, in your careers, a large part of my time is actually spent in meetings. So I would say about 50%. But the other 50% really is where my design work truly lives. So I block dedicated time for trend research and stay aware of what's happening across health care and technology world. I create a lot of frameworks and conceptual assets to make sense of fuzzy and emerging topics. And many of those assets are actually being used then in internal strategy workshops or even at the cocreation room that I show later.

I regularly visit customers to observe workflows and capture those real world insights that I talk about. But there's also documentation. So I create a lot of slides. It's how I synthesize and communicate and align with others what I've learned. So I would say PowerPoint and Miro are my daily companions. It's where the frameworks and the slides are being created, of course. And Copilot or other AI tools challenge my thinking. And next to that, I have also these tools, Figma, Sketchbook, Firefly. They help me to visualize ideas so I can actually articulate it to others what could be a possible future. And then Slido and Excel help me gather and analyze data. So in all of this, you can see it's really a mix of meetings, research, creation, observation, storytelling.

And that combination is what makes what I like about my job the most, and so impactful and so fun to do. So that's a little bit about the background of experience design strategy and and what why co creation is so important. But let's look at what co creation means in practice. Now I already mentioned I will share two examples. The Co Creation Room, we have, one of the most intense and insightful environments we have, and then the user meetings. So let's start with the Co Creation Room. That's really a dedicated workshop space at large medical congresses like, ECR, European Congress of Radiology, RSNA is the radiology conference of North America, and ASTRO is like a, radiation oncology conference. And inside this room, we run these fast paced thirty minutes dialogues with customers.

And it's only one customer group at the time, and it's under NDA, so non disclosure agreement. And there's no slide deck, so no digital screens. It's just posters, cards, post its, obviously, to to have conversations. And the space is really designed for those deep focus conversations, as I mentioned, about the future of health care. No distractions and no typical constraints of what, when you would observe people in their hospital life. Now I hope this is going to work. I made a I attached a short video that we, usually run to to actually advocate about this room on LinkedIn and, ask customers to come, which I wanted to show. So it gives you a little bit of a sneak peek where and how that room is. So I hope it will play. Welcome to Ares and a 2025.

What if the future of imaging was not just imagined, but cocreated? Join me to the innovation cocreation. In this room, bold ideas are not just discussed. They're designed. So whether you're a tech enthusiast or a patient advocate, share with us your biggest challenges, and we tackle them together. Don't miss the opportunity to join one of our sessions. So as you saw, it is the room is not necessarily in our booth, but slightly outside, which is good because we, again, take people away from the booth to the, to a separate room where we have those dialogues. Now the magic of this room is what we can learn in just a few days because we get a really deep insights that will provide us feedback on our road maps around a huge variety of voices. We have big academic hospitals that come by to smaller imaging centers to people from Brazil, Germany, US. It can be every region.

And customers tell us after these sessions that their thoughts feel clearer and they feel inspired. They see us not just as a vendor, but as a trusted innovation partner. Now why does it help that it is at the congress environment? I already mentioned it's really to have access to all those many different perspectives that all gather at such a conference place. But also because customers have uninterrupted time. They're available, basically. They won't be called away because someone, has an emergency and needs, care. They're already also in a very innovative mindset because everything around them in this conference is talking about what possible, futures could be like, what new, products are out there. And this innovative environment really helps them to embrace this dialogue about what the future holds. Now, to have a meaningful conversation in 30, you must really come prepared.

So we must come prepared with a point of view, a real subject matter expertise because clinicians expect you to guide their thinking and to challenge assumptions they might have and to bring inspiration. At the same time, though, you must keep this growth mindset. So ask questions, stay curious, spot opportunities, and accept feedback to the point of view that you bring in, even if it contradicts your own assumptions. So it's really a delicate balance between being knowledgeable and staying open. And one of the biggest risks in here is falling into these cognitive biases, especially when you spend weeks preparing the material, which I will come to shortly. And these biases, such as the confirmation biases, you hear only what confirms already your assumptions or the anchoring bias by letting the first conversation shape the conversations that comes afterwards.

So preparation for this, to have the point of view is important. But as always, and as you might have heard before, you can't fall in love with your own preparation. So you really need to have be open to other points of view and feedback. Now as this hints to already is that running a co creation room in such a congress really relies heavily on the hidden craft of facilitation because you have to navigate power dynamics. Sessions may include c suite level people from hospitals, or they may have key opinion leaders and clinicians with very strong authorities, that you want to have a great dialogue with. You also have to transform initial skepticism because they might not have done such a session before into curiosity.

I had one customer coming in once, and he told me, you have five minutes. Tell me something I don't already know. And, actually, he stayed for the full thirty minutes of the session and later even asked me if he if I wanted to work for him. I stayed at GE, but, it was an interesting dialogue we had and an interesting share of knowledge. And remember, all of this happens in just thirty minutes, as I explained. So the key is that you need to guide a conversation without rushing it, and you must earn trust immediately. You don't have hours to build a relationship. You have a few minutes.

And that, I think, is what makes the floor very challenging, but also very incredibly energizing when the sessions go well and when, when you get great insights. As I mentioned, preparation is really key in this. So it's preparation is critical and intense, because we never really know what direction a clinician will take the topic that we propose. So we do beforehand propose the topics that we want to discuss, but we want to prepare stimuli that can follow the mental model of that clinician, and not our mental model. So as you can see here, I made this visual to show you that we have then stimuli. Every Steam note represents a different topic within the broader topic that we can explore, and every session follows a different path through that.

And so one conversation might follow one path, and the other one could follow a completely different path. What is important here to know is that even if we never use half of the materials, because it does happen, I made something and we never even showed it to a customer because the conversation never went there, The preparation materials itself is also the deliverable because it sharpens our point of view on the topic that we want to discuss, and it aligns our teams internally.

It forces us to think strategically before we speak to the customer. So preparation isn't really a wasted effort. It's it's really the foundation of these co creation rooms as well. And it works on, it relies on a very multidisciplinary team. So we bring in design researchers, hardware designers, UX designers, clinical people, marketing, product experts, technology experts. It's very multidisciplinary, and everyone brings a unique lens. And within that, it's also key that we have the business stakeholders involved or the decision makers because later, they need to apply the insights into their strategic decisions and roadmaps. So co creation really succeeds also when all these disciplines converge in the preparation. So that was the co creation room. Intense, thirty minute discussions, one customer at a time. Another form of co creation we do is that we have these interactive sessions, during GE Healthcare user meetings.

And GE Healthcare user meetings are full day educational events that the GA healthcare teams in every country host with their customers. And customers then come there to learn about new clinical applications, features, workflows. And to that full day clinical education program, we add one hour cocreation session. And it's on a topic that could be relevant to everyone in that room, like the future of work, patient experience, the role of AI. It's a completely different environment, like, from the congresses, but it's also equally rich to discuss those topics with this group of people. Because everything in this session is then plenary. So we have to use tools like a live polling tool to make the dialogue very interactive. And this really transforms the experience because everyone can answer, and can also skip a question, but the answers also appear instantly on the big screen.

People get inspired by seeing how others respond to it, unlike the co creation room we have at congresses. It's really confined to the one customer, to GE Healthcare dialogue we have. So like in this example, I know it's a small phone. You can see that there I asked, what is the hardest thing to learn with your job as a radiographer? And the audience got really inspired by seeing, a, that what they said was not the same as what all the other people said, or b, because there was a lot of overlap between what they thought was very hard and what others thought was very hard. Because we have often 70 to 80 people in the room, we gain those valuable quantitative insights. And because we're present throughout the day, we can also continue the conversations during the breaks and follow-up with customers individually to get more qualitative feedback on some of the learnings.

So it's really what works here is that it's really part of a broader program, so customers are there already for a reason, for a benefit, and it's really for us to connect to customers more individually in the breaks and in the throughout the day. So I wanted to practice this. I wanted you to experience this a little bit with a one Slido example that I made here. So I hope this is going to work because you would need to scan this QR code with your phone, and it should directly open the Slido so there is no, like, fill in the name, everything. And answer this question, what to you means great employee experience? So I'll give it a minute to see if it's working. Connection and growth. Great. I like that. Flexibility. Being recognized. Yeah. Right. Cool. So you see what it's doing is that it is showing especially when you have 70 to 80 answers on this, it will aggregate them together into one overview.

And you see better and the audience can already see patterns, but they can also see the individual, answers. So I'll move forward because I asked a similar question to technologists in one of our user meetings. So what makes great staff experience for you? And this word cloud that you see here is the result. So you see themes like colleagues, teamwork, trust, helpful environment, good exam quality, happy, thankful patients, and even little fun answers like when there is cake or holiday with a salary. So it's also in all these fun answers that the room creates a little bit of excitement and engagement, and it really helps. Another example of a question that I ask is, why did you become a technologist? And most of them say the same thing, in other words.

And I synthesize it really in this combination of high end technology and working with people. Now, why does this matter, these insights for us as GED? Well, these insights really help us understand the consequence of technology on their future roles. So how can we maintain the parts of their job that they really like and are enjoyable to them and alleviate what that what is a burden? So that's where these insights help us to understand how we can apply technology that is meaningful. Right? As I started with in the beginning, we want to empower the system to really take care of people in a way, both patients and staff. Now another tool I use is provocations, and they help participants escape their current constraints and service the deeper hopes and fears.

So to come up with provocations, I use the PESTLE framework, political, environmental, social, technology, legal, and economic trends. And instead of asking what do you think, what would you want, what do you wish, which can lead to incremental answers, we ask more what if. And suddenly, the conversation becomes really much more open. So as an example, what if epidemics became recurring events that constantly stress the system? Or what if human interaction becomes a purchasable option in health care? Or what if every doctor had an AI twin avatar working alongside them? So these questions really unlock very different dialogue, and they become about opportunities. There's really two styles of provocations that I have and that I use, and they one is more abstract and one is more personal.

The more abstract provocation is not directly about the clinician or about the health care professional that you talk to. They're more safe, exploratory, and help people escape the limits of today. The personal provocations instead, they really speak directly to the participant's life or role. And therefore, they trigger stronger emotional reactions. Like, for example, here, you can see that I asked, what if your support technologist was an AI assistant instead of a broad provocation? What if every doctor has an AI twin avatar? So that second provocation hits much closer to home than this generic future scenario. And as you can see, the results at answers, these are actual results, are really a split between people. Most of the people really say, oh, no.

But there's definitely a group of people that have smileys and even five of them that said, yes, please. Give me this support technologist that is an AI assistant. So both styles are really useful. One opens more imagination and the dialogue of opportunity, and the other one opens more emotion and the dialogue of why do you feel that way? What makes it that you have that emotion? So again here, I'd like to experience this briefly yourself and see how you answer this question, what if one key part of your job became completely invisible, but you were still held accountable for the outcome? Let's that's not completely oh, no. Two oh, no's. Okay. I hope you noticed that with this question, I'm not asking you what you need.

I'm asking you to react to something. And that reaction actually tells us far more than some requirements ever could. And that's really what I mean with going beyond post it theater and workshops. And co creation really is about going beyond asking questions, but get to the deeper level. Now everything we've done so far involved talking to users. But to truly understand users, you talking alone is not sufficient. So you need to also pay attention to what users do, not just what they say. So therefore, we also use techniques like role playing with our customers to experience workflows from another person's perspective. So I let a radiologist play a technologist or the technologist play the patient. It's also about shadowing to observe behavior in context.

And it's about data analysis, to find patterns that are invisible in interviews. So we need talking that reveals intention and behaviour that reveals truth. And both of them, we need to uncover opportunities. So without going in much more detail into these cocreation techniques, I want to conclude this with two key takeouts. So when cocreation is done well, it creates meaningful innovation, not innovation for the sake of novelty, but innovation rooted in realities of people's lives and workflows. And it builds loyalty, not through marketing, but through trust. So this quote captures it perfectly for me. These sessions align with your brand promise of intentional innovation. They are not only inspiring, but crucial for capturing perspectives of radiologists and clinicians. I love them. So this is the voice of someone who felt heard, respected, and engaged, And that's the emotional value of cocreation. People feel part of your future they're shaping.

And then lastly, this other quote highlights an equally important dimension. It's the internal impact of cocreation because cocreation completely opened my eyes to the complexity of the problems we solve while a product manager within our team. So when a colleague sees the system more clearly, they build better decisions, They build better products. And that is competitive advantage, not because we're more faster, but because we move more truthfully with clarity, empathy, and alignment. So the value of co creation is not just what we learn from our customers, but also how it transforms us as a company. And that is what I wanted to share with you today.

So if you're interested in joining the tenant community for me, you can scan this QR code on this slide, and it will ask you to register for this session. And with that, we add you to the talent community. So I want to thank you for listening and enjoying the rest of the conference.

Thank you, Nicole, for for sharing all this with us, for for being here today. And thank you for everyone, who who joined. There are more sessions awaiting for you. And we thank, Nicole and GE Healthcare for being us with us today here.

You're welcome. Thank you.