Talent Acquisition May 04, 2022

Lesley Solomon: My Three Favorite Things About Working at Redesign Health

As a part of our “My Favorite Things About Working at Redesign Health’’ series, we welcome one of our Venture Chairs, Lesley Solomon, to share her experience leading the growth of healthcare organizations. The Redesign team is growing. Come join us!

I joined Redesign Health in July 2021 as a Venture Chair to help founding teams build and launch healthcare companies. The Venture Chair role is unique — we start out with an idea for a business model and conduct in-depth market research to identify the problem and product-market fit. Our team of experts across technology, healthcare, and finance then pressure tests the concept to determine viability. Once it gets greenlit, we help build the foundation for the business, recruit the founding team and work towards a public launch. Once a company is launched, we then serve on their board, so we can continue our role as an advisor beyond the earliest days.

I’m currently getting ready to launch my first operating company focused on women’s health. Women’s health has been really important to me for a long time — not just because I’m a woman, but because women have traditionally been an underserved segment of the population when it comes to healthcare.

I was drawn to Redesign Health because I love building things. I spent the first half of my career in the startup space, and have always been drawn to startup company energy. The fact that Redesign is still a startup itself, and the concept of creating many more healthcare startups — and being part of crafting and growing those teams — was so exciting to me. Creating positive change is both a massive opportunity and a massive challenge, one that I’m excited to work towards here at Redesign.

Across the healthcare spectrum, patients and providers have unique needs that require thoughtful, innovative solutions. Our research is driving findings that bridge those gaps.

Narrowing down my favorite things about Redesign to just three things is tough. Here it goes!

1. The degree of meaningful consideration that goes into how we’ve constructed and continue to build Redesign as an organization, which directly impacts how we go about building our operating companies.

The thoughtfulness around the process of how we form founding teams and the way we engage with them and their potential leaders is like nothing I’ve ever experienced before. It’s a process that I’ve developed a deep respect for because it helps us identify people who will make these companies successful in impacting as many lives as possible.
2. There’s significant potential for impact.

I’ve spent half of my career working in healthcare on the provider side, focusing on innovation at Brigham Women’s Hospital and the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. I loved that I could change patients’ lives, but I wanted to accelerate the pace at which I could affect patients, as well as the scale of the impact I was making. Because the healthcare ecosystem is so expansive, it struggles with inefficiencies at every level, while the complex regulatory environment makes innovation and early-stage company growth difficult.
In my past roles, I approached innovation within healthcare by first thinking through the patient journey and identifying a problem or gap within the healthcare system, and then creating a solution. A solution is useless if the problem it supposedly solves doesn’t exist. That thinking is absolutely applicable within our work process at Redesign: identifying gaps in care and then ensuring that a market exists where we can really make a difference.
Across the healthcare spectrum, patients and providers have unique needs that require thoughtful, innovative solutions. Our research is driving findings that bridge those gaps. Jasper, for example, is an end-to-end solution that connects individuals with cancer who are navigating the stressful, multifaceted cancer care process with both caregivers and providers, by providing emotional and logistical support in one place. Lively simplifies and democratizes the process of obtaining a technologically advanced hearing aid, expanding the access that those with hearing loss have to a life-changing solution.
The ability to change the world and make it a better place using the skills I’ve developed over time — that’s a huge part of what drives me. The operating companies we’ve helped bring to launch have already helped over ten million individuals. The ability to impact lives is an incredibly powerful thing.
3. The Redesign Health team brings a certain levity to the table.

Not to discount the immense talent, empathy, and drive that each employee brings to work with them, but the laughter we share sticks out to me: it makes each day so enjoyable. So many people are joining Redesign from all different backgrounds because of the strength of our mission and vision. It’s exciting to see people suddenly realize that they can contribute to the world in this meaningful way, and it helps create an upbeat environment. We’re all constantly asking ourselves what might be possible. It opens up new ways of thinking about the world of healthcare.

Lesley Solomon Venture Chair

After earning her degrees from Cornell and Harvard Business School, Lesley began her career in marketing. She brought her years of marketing expertise to the healthcare industry as the Innovation Hub Executive Director, Director of Innovation & Strategy, and Director of Philanthropy at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. While being a Co-Founder and Board Member of the Food Allergy Initiative, she served as the Senior Vice President and Chief InnovationOfficer of the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. Her experience as an Executive Leader with a history of securing long-term growth for organizations operating within the fields of healthcare and the life sciences led her to join Vereastem Oncology as a board member.

Lesley Solomon: My Three Favorite Things About Working at Redesign Health

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