Brandy Olson Joins Blue Cottage of CannonDesign

Brandy Olson joins Blue Cottage of CannonDesign as a senior vice president and client leader based in the firm’s New York office. An industrial engineer, Lean Six Sigma Black Belt and human-centered design evangelist, Olson will partner with health systems across the country to find innovative ways to transform the health and wellness experience.

Olson comes to Blue Cottage of CannonDesign from The Estee Lauder Companies where she was the director of strategic initiatives, connecting the dots between strategy, process and human experiences to launch the company’s biggest transformations. Prior to that role, she was the director of operations design at HDR, as well as the manager of operations, logistics and process improvement for perioperative services at Nebraska Medicine. According to Olson, this eclectic career path has shaped the way she approaches problem-solving.

With experience working on transformative projects of all scales, Olson has helped some of the nation’s most respected healthcare organizations evolve their approaches to care delivery. For example, she partnered with Kaiser Permanente to reimagine its approach to ambulatory care; helped Rush University Medical Center carefully balance data-driven and experience design techniques to create a new patient-centered ambulatory center for cancer and neurological care and guided Advocate Healthcare through a process to develop the “clinic of the future “prototype – applying Lean concepts to optimize and align operations, patient engagement, sustainability and technology through the patient journey.

Olson was an inaugural recipient of the U40 Award from the AIA Academy of Architecture for Health and The Next Generation Committee and has shared her perspective on design’s ability to improve healthcare at conferences across the globe, including Health Datapalooza, Hospital Build Europe and the Health Facility Institute’s Annual Symposium, among others. She has her Master of Engineering with a concentration in management engineering from the University of Nebraska at Lincoln, as well as her Lean certification from the University of Michigan.