Craig Joseph, MD
Portrait of Craig Joseph, MD

Craig Joseph, MD

Craig Joseph, MD, is a pediatrician and clinical informaticist who makes the case that much of what healthcare calls clinician burnout is a design failure, not a resilience failure. A former CMIO at health systems running Epic and Oracle Health, he co-authored Designing for Health: The Human-Centered Approach and hosts the Designing for Health podcast. He is Chief Medical Officer at Nordic Global.

About

When a health system responds to exhausted clinicians with resilience training, he argues, it is often asking people to adapt to tools that should have been designed to fit them.

He came to that view from the operational side of medicine. As chief medical information officer (CMIO) at health systems running Epic and Oracle Health (Cerner), he was responsible for making the electronic health record work for the physicians, nurses and other clinicians who depended on it. His work since has centered on EHR usability, physician workflow, clinical decision support, quality improvement and the change management that determines whether a new tool is adopted or quietly worked around.

He co-authored Designing for Health: The Human-Centered Approach (2023) with Jerome Pagani, PhD, a practical guide to applying human-centered design to the problems clinicians and patients run into every day. He hosts the Designing for Health podcast, where he talks with clinicians, researchers and designers about how care gets built, and he writes a newsletter every three weeks at notes.craigjosephmd.com. His audience is mostly health system executives and clinician leaders, the people who decide which problems get fixed.

Background

Craig Joseph earned a Bachelor of Science in computer science at the University of Miami and his MD at Wayne State University, then completed his pediatrics residency at Children's Hospital of Michigan in Detroit. He has been continuously board-certified in pediatrics by the American Board of Pediatrics since 1997 and has held board certification in clinical informatics from the American Board of Preventive Medicine since 2016. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Pediatrics (FAAP) and a Fellow of the American Medical Informatics Association (FAMIA). He is based in Las Vegas, Nevada. His full name is Craig Maurice Joseph, and his National Provider Identifier (NPI) is 1215745856.

What he works on

Writing

Craig writes for health-system executives and clinician leaders on clinical informatics, EHR usability, quality improvement, and change management. Read the latest posts.