Head of Design - Elation Health

Elation Health exists to enable every patient to experience the highest quality care wherever they go in the healthcare system. We build technology for independent primary care practices and the physicians, clinicians, and teams who care for their patients every day.

Our platform brings together a clinical-first EHR, intelligent automation, billing, patient engagement, and the workflows that help primary care practices deliver excellent care and build sustainable businesses. The work is consequential: when our products are clear, trustworthy, and well designed, clinicians can spend more time focused on patients and less time fighting their tools.

Primary care is foundational to a healthy healthcare system, yet the technology supporting it is often fragmented, burdensome, and disconnected from the realities of clinical work. At Elation, Design has the opportunity to make the experience of practicing medicine meaningfully better—while helping independent primary care remain strong, sustainable, and human.

We are seeking a passionate Design leader to drive our design strategy, build a strongly capable Design organization, raise the quality and coherence of the product experience, and use AI-native ways of working to deliver more intuitive, trusted, and impactful experiences for clinicians and practices at scale.

The Opportunity

As Head of Design, you will set the vision, standards, and operating model for Design at Elation. You will lead a talented team of product designers and design partners, work closely with Product and Engineering leadership, and bring a strong design point of view to company strategy and product decisions.

This is a hands-on leadership role for someone who can move comfortably between the strategic and the concrete: defining a coherent experience across a complex product, coaching designers through difficult problems, raising the quality bar, and ensuring the details hold up in the hands of real clinicians.

You will report to the Chief Product Officer and serve as a senior voice in the Product Development organization.

What You’ll Do

• Set Design Vision: Set and communicate a clear design vision for Elation’s product experience, grounded in clinical-first principles and the realities of primary care.
• Lead AI-Native Design: Lead and shape an AI-native Design organization with a durable operating model for how designers, agents, and cross-functional teams work together to create higher-quality experiences at greater speed.
• Build High-Performing Teams: Clarify roles and responsibilities, establish effective operating rhythms, create growth paths, and hire and retain exceptional design talent.
• Strategic Partnering: Partner with the CPO, product leaders, engineering leaders, and executive stakeholders to translate company strategy into a focused product experience strategy and roadmap.
• Raise Quality: Elevate the quality bar across the end-to-end user experience, including research, service design, product strategy, interaction design, visual design, content, accessibility, and customer enablement.
• Scale Design Systems: Strengthen principles, patterns, documentation, design systems, research practices, and reusable frameworks. Implement a practical design-review culture.
• User Research & Empathy: Foster deep empathy for clinicians and practice teams by embedding a rigorous culture of user research across product development.
• Drive Problem Solving: Help teams solve the right problems, create clarity in ambiguous spaces, and make tradeoffs explicit.
• Execute with Engineering: Partner closely with Engineering to ensure design intent survives implementation and the finished product is reliable, coherent, accessible, and delightful.
• Develop Talent: Develop designers as leaders and active contributors to product direction.

What Success Looks Like

• Improved clinician and practice-team experience, usability, consistency, and confidence.
• Greater design quality and product coherence with fewer late-stage design issues and rework.
• Enhanced quality and consistency of customer insight used in product decisions.
• Strong design team health, retention, hiring, growth, and clarity of ownership.
• Accelerated Product Development velocity through design systems, review practices, reusable patterns, and AI-native workflows.

What We’re Looking For

• Significant experience leading product design in a complex, multi-surface, or highly regulated environment (healthcare, health tech, or enterprise SaaS preferred).
• Demonstrated track record of building, scaling, or strengthening a design organization (hiring, coaching, org design, talent development).
• Strong product judgment connecting design decisions to customer outcomes, business strategy, and technical realities.
• Proven success partnering with Product and Engineering leaders and influencing strategy beyond the Design function.
• Deep fluency across the UX stack: research, service design, information architecture, interaction design, visual design, systems thinking, and design ops.
• Exceptional communication and storytelling skills to convey design rationale to executives and cross-functional partners.
• Comfort operating in ambiguity and creating structure where needed.