Jennie Kung

Jennie Kung

Discipline: Health System Executive
Funding awarded to: UCLA Health

Advance Care Planning (ACP): Building the Foundation for Comprehensive Delivery of Personalized Medicine

To build a framework for the preparation of a UCLA-specific strategic plan for advance care planning (ACP), informed by human-centered design, to align with UCLA Health’s strategic priorities. If successful, this framework can be applied at other institutions in the creation of their own strategic plans to build meaningful and impactful ACP and palliative care programs.

“It may be difficult to imagine how my experience working for The Walt Disney Company can be leveraged to my work in palliative care. But it turns out the insight I gleaned from working at a place that creates magical content and immersive environments has nearly exact parallels to healthcare. During my time at Disney, I learned from the best: a team we call Disney Imagineers, who utilize design thinking principles to transform a simple guest insight into value-added offerings, enhancing the overall guest experience in the theme parks. The organization’s competitive strength is in creating emotional synergies across numerous platforms – from movies and video games, to plush animals and magical rides. Everything serves to meet the consumer’s wants and needs, in a culturally and age appropriate way, even before they knew they wanted it themselves. I aim to be the change-agent that bridges patients with our health system priorities, ACP and palliative care clinicians, researchers, and innovators. I hope to bring the findings from my project and practical operational tactics for ACP beyond UCLA to peer institutions, into sectors outside of healthcare, and even across the Pacific Ocean to Asia where palliative care is just starting to become part of the conversation. Just as Disney integrated their American characters and stories into the fabric of the Chinese childhood, I hope to use human-centered design as my primary tactic to normalize ACP at UCLA and beyond.”