The challenge

South Los Angeles faced a shortage of roughly 1,200 physicians, leaving preventive care difficult to reach even when residents wanted it. Ford’s Greenfield Labs and Martin Luther King Jr. Community Hospital asked how mobility could do more than transport patients: a vehicle, service, and digital experience might bring useful care into the community itself, in places that felt familiar and easy to enter.

My contribution

I worked as an interaction designer and technical prototyper on an embedded team spanning service, industrial, and healthcare design. Across three design sprints, we learned with more than 150 residents and conducted 25 deeper interviews with community members and health partners.

I helped translate the research into an integrated service rather than a vehicle alone:

• Designed a Ford Transit interior with space for learning, screening, and a private clinical conversation.
• Prototyped a mobile appointment experience for finding the service, booking a visit, and understanding what would happen next.
• Built a community-health-worker model connecting the van to trusted neighborhood relationships and follow-up care.

We used tangible service maps, software prototypes, and the physical van to co-design with residents. That made trade-offs visible across privacy, comfort, staffing, routing, and the realities of accessing care without a car.

The impact

The VIVA pilot delivered more than 30 hours of mobile health service in South LA and gave Ford and MLK Community Hospital a tested model for bringing screenings and guidance into neighborhoods. The wider research also informed Ford GoRide, the company’s non-emergency medical transportation service, which later reported a 92% on-time arrival rate.

The project showed that mobility could be part of the care environment itself. Its value came from designing the van, software, clinical workflow, and community relationship as one connected experience, allowing meaningful access to begin before a patient ever entered a hospital.