Jennifer Phillips

Jennifer Phillips serves as Virginia Mason Medical Center's innovation director in Seattle. She has been instrumental in introducing experience-based co-design methods to improve patient-family and staff experiences, as well as integrating these techniques into the organization’s approach to improvement based on lean thinking.

She previously developed and led a Project Management Office at Virginia Mason, and prior to that she managed the organization's employee communications program. A newspaper reporter in her humble beginnings, she has since spent many years focused on corporate communications and quality improvement, mainly in healthcare. She serves as internal faculty in innovation, creative thinking, lean production system and experience-based design concepts and methods.

Jennifer has experience managing large-scale organizational projects and events from planning to closure, facilitating improvement teams and workshops, and designing and teaching workshops for adult learners. She has a bachelor’s in journalism and master’s in communications.