Sara Misconish Edwards

Sara Edwards is a healthcare design leader and intrapreneur dedicated to making complex systems more human. As Director of Design at the Veale Healthcare Transformation Institute at University Hospitals in Cleveland, she leads multidisciplinary teams that partner with clinicians, patients, community organizations, and operational leaders to redesign healthcare experiences and services. With more than 15 years of experience spanning healthcare, technology, and product strategy, Sara's work sits at the intersection of human-centered design, systems thinking, and implementation. Before joining University Hospitals, she spent nearly a decade leading product strategy and innovation at Progressive Insurance, where she helped launch and scale several digital products and ventures. Today, her work focuses on some of healthcare's most challenging problems—including Medicaid access, responsible AI, workforce safety, care delivery transformation, and digital health. Rather than designing individual products alone, Sara is passionate about designing organizations that can learn, adapt, and build trust with the people they serve. Her approach combines deep listening, community partnership, rapid experimentation, and practical implementation to help ideas become lasting change. Sara is also a published author, speaker, and educator whose work explores the role of human-centered design in healthcare transformation. She believes the most meaningful innovation begins by understanding people's lived experiences and ends with systems that are not only more effective, but more compassionate.