Who we are

Vayu Health is a non-profit healthcare community-based organization in California launching a completely different care model for low-income people living with uncontrolled chronic conditions (starting with people with diabetes) who also have high social and behavioral needs, and we are looking for like-minded people passionate about equity, person-centered care, and reducing barriers to accessing high-caliber care.

We believe that a major shift is needed in the way we care.

We are and believe in

• Acting with passion and creativity
• Leading with integrity
• Committing to being better
• Achieving strength through teams
• Inclusivity, where all individuals should be treated with grace and dignity

The Opportunity

The CI Associate is the "boots-on-the-ground" person for Vayu’s operational and clinical execution. While leadership dictates the improvement priorities and strategic A3 goals, you are the person who turns those visions into functional reality. You are a "builder" who thrives in the messy "Stage 0" of a startup, comfortable designing new workflows from scratch and manually filling process gaps while you build long-term solutions.

You are ideally a practitioner of the IHI Model for Improvement or something similar who excels in a 100% virtual environment, using digital tools to facilitate and ensure our multidisciplinary teams have clarity on our core model and adapt where needed to ensure we continue to improve our clinical outcomes and stay true to our human guiding principles as we scale and spread.

Responsibilities:

1. Clinical Workflow Facilitation & PDSA Execution

• Problem Framing: Be able to co-create, refine, and utilize service workflows and A3 like problem framing with the leadership team
• Understand Current State: Observe workflows, facilitate work sessions with teams to analyze current state workflows: identify unmet needs, barriers to engagement, points of friction, etc.
• Identify Root Causes: Facilitate and help teams and the organization fix the right thing
• Co-Design Potential Solutions: Facilitate leaders/teams/members to brainstorm small, testable changes rapidly
• Rapid Cycle Testing: Facilitate small-scale, rapid Plan-Do-Study-Act (PDSA) cycles at the clinical front line to test and refine workflows such as member enrollment, clinical assessments, and remote monitoring. Goal is to learn fast without disrupting the whole system.
• Standard Work Documentation: Assist clinical teams in creating and maintaining "Standard Work" (SOPs) to ensure care is delivered consistently across all patient cohorts.
• Visual Management: Maintain virtual clinical performance boards and trackers that allow teams to see, in real-time, whether clinical processes are meeting targets.

2. Clinical Design Support & User Insights

• Empathy Gathering: Support the clinical design process by conducting empathy interviews and "shadowing" clinicians to identify friction points in the delivery of care.
• Prototyping: Assist in the development of new workflows and low-fidelity prototypes for new clinical tools (e.g., simplified patient education materials or outreach scripts) and gather immediate user feedback.
• Patient Voice: Help integrate patient feedback into the clinical model by facilitating focus groups or surveys to ensure the program remains human-centered.
• Assist in the design or re-design of human centered workflows to fill gaps in our clinical model

3. Data Collection & Clinical Reliability

• Fidelity Audits: Conduct regular "fidelity checks" to ensure clinical teams are adhering to the established care model and identify areas where additional coaching or process redesign is needed, esp as we are growingData Measurement To Learn: Work with clinical staff to design simple, non-burdensome data collection methods that capture key process metrics (e.g., time to first clinical visit, outreach success rates) or for short-term data measurements and collection for priority improvement work
• Run Chart Maintenance: Track and display clinical process data using run charts to help teams distinguish between "common cause" and "special cause" variation in their daily work. Goal is to know if changes are actually improving things.

4. Front-Line Coaching & Capacity Building

• Skill Building: Provide "just-in-time" coaching to care teams on basic improvement tools such as process mapping, 5-Whys root cause analysis, and brainstorming.
• Facilitate Team Adoption: Encourage a growth mindset and make changes stick in real workflows. Help positively encourage reduction in variation as we scale and spread but know when we have to stay flexible due to different community needs, etc
• A3 Support: Support Senior Leadership by gathering "Current State" data and observations for larger organizational A3 problem-solving efforts.
• Culture of Improvement: Serve as an advocate for a "no-blame" culture where clinical errors or process failures are viewed as opportunities for systemic improvement. Make improvement ongoing, not one-time.

Required Qualifications:

• Education: Bachelor’s degree in Healthcare Administration, Nursing, Public Health, or a related field.
• Experience: 2–4 years of experience in healthcare quality improvement, design thinking concepts (Empathy, Ideation, Prototyping), and designing new human centered workflows.
• Improvement Certification: Such as IHI Open School Basic, Lean Six-Sigma, Certified Professional in Healthcare Quality (CPQH), IHI Improvement Coach, or something similar.
• Soft Skills: Strong interpersonal skills with the ability to build trust with diverse clinical teams; high degree of "clinical empathy" for both staff and patients.
• Technical Skills: Proficiency in data visualization tools (Excel, Tableau) and process mapping software (LucidChart/Visio).
• Environment Experience:
• Start-up like: Experience working in an unstructured environment that requires rapid prototyping
• Virtual: Experience setting up, utilizing, maintaining virtual improvement tools (ie Miro, LucidChart, Visio) for workflows, fishbones, etc and being able to facilitate improvement work with virtual teams.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Experience in an outpatient primary care clinical setting (FQHC, Primary Care, Community Health, or something similar)
• Lived experience with diabetes, chronic conditions, and/or Medicaid
• Design Thinking / HCD Certification