Maria Ines Zelaya
Maria Ines Zelaya, Senior Design Strategist, Digital Scientists
The BRIDGE Canvas: Human-Centered AI for Healthcare — A Framework to build trust, preserve dignity, and adopt responsibly
The BRIDGE Canvas emerged from our work with Minimum Data Set (MDS) nurses—clinical professionals who assess patient care and quality outcomes in healthcare facilities. Despite managing complex patient data daily, AI solutions introduced to streamline their workflows often failed. Through collaborative workshops, we diagnosed root causes of resistance, revealing a critical insight: distrust in AI systems and cultural aversion to automation in critical care contexts.
From these findings, we created the BRIDGE Canvas—a framework for responsibly integrating AI into healthcare. It prioritizes “building that bridge” first through a structured process: grounding decisions in human needs and ethics, fostering trust, and scaling solutions incrementally. This ensures AI supports care providers and patients rather than prioritizing efficiency alone.
In this session, attendees will learn to apply the BRIDGE Canvas to:
Deploy AI ethically using a human-centered roadmap,
Align AI with clinical and patient priorities,
Transform existing design tools into steps for sustainable, patient-driven solutions amid rapid technological change.
The session challenges professionals to reject efficiency-over-empathy shortcuts and instead reimagine AI as a bridge to better care.
About Maria
Design Strategist with 9 + years of experience in service design, design strategy, and UX research. She has worked across fields such as retail, fintech, logistics, digital health, pharmaceutics and nuclear energy. Proficient in qualitative research, understanding complex problems and synthesizing insights to impact design and strategy. Maria holds a Master of Arts in Design Management from the Savannah College of Art and Design and a bachelors degree in Service design and Communication design from Universidad de Los Andes, Bogota, Colombia.