Dr. Monique Smith is the Founding Director of Health DesignED: The Acute Care Design + Innovation Center in the Department of Emergency Medicine at Emory University, an emergency physician at Grady Memorial Hospital, and a thought leader on design thinking in healthcare and health equity.
With expertise in service design and systems strengthening, Dr Smiith leverages design thinking to reimagine the spectrum of acute care from the moment patients experience symptoms to long after they walk out of the hospital’s sliding glass doors.
In addition to founding Health DesignED, she has worked to create tech-enabled care for seniors, develop digital vaccines, and address inequity in maternal outcomes for women of color through virtual health initiatives. Dr. Smith obtained her Bachelors in Medical Anthropology from Harvard; Masters in Health Policy, Planning, and Financing at the London School of Economics and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine; and her MD from Harvard. Prior to Grady Memorial Hospital, Dr. Smith practiced emergency medicine at Kaiser Permanente and safety-net hospitals in Oakland and Atlanta. Her research has been published in Health Care Policy and Health and Social Care in the Community.