Designing for Health: Interview with Mark Townsend, MD

The innovation of technology and processes inherently requires not only trial and error but a non-negligible amount of risk. This presents a unique challenge for the healthcare industry, which both needs innovation and has very little room for risk or error. To move the industry into the future, leaders must adopt a nuanced approach that simultaneously appreciates governance and its goals and is willing to take calculated risks to fail fast and fail forward.

On this episode of In Network’s Designing for Health podcast feature, Nordic Chief Medical Officer Craig Joseph, MD, chats with Bon Secours Mercy Health Executive in Residence Mark Townsend, MD. They discuss Dr. Townsend’s path from internal medicine and cardiology to his current role as a health system administrator, as well as his work with emerging healthcare startups, balancing cybersecurity and customization within the electronic health record, and what it means to “fail forward.”

You can find complete show notes on the originally published article on Nordic’s blog.

Meet the Host

Craig Joseph, MD

Chief Medical Officer
LinkedIn: Craig Joseph MD, FAAP, FAMIA
X: @CraigJoseph
Read his articles

Dr. Joseph is the Chief Medical Officer of Nordic Consulting Partners, a global healthcare management consulting firm. Craig has 30 years of healthcare and IT experience. In addition to practicing medicine as a primary care pediatrician for eight years, he worked for Epic for six-plus years and has served as chief medical information officer at multiple healthcare organizations, using both Cerner and Epic.

Craig is a Fellow of the American Academy of Pediatrics and American Medical Informatics Association. He remains actively board-certified in both pediatrics and clinical informatics.

About the Show

When it comes to how healthcare works in the U.S., one wonders, who designed it? Well, no one. And that’s the problem. Dr. Craig Joseph speaks with luminaries from across the health ecosystem about how to make healthcare work for humans. The upshot? The way out of the frustrating, expensive, and frequently ineffective quagmire of the U.S. healthcare system is to take a step back and bring intentional, human-centered design to an ecosystem that works for the people giving and receiving care.

Follow the show’s social hashtag #DesigningforHealth.