Intend Health Strategies

Intend Health Strategies empowers the healthcare community with the mindset and tools to connect in our relationships, knowing that the quality of our human interactions is the most important element in catalyzing positive change.

In the short term, it is our goal to help individuals build the mindset and tactical skills needed to create strong interpersonal connections and positive team dynamics. In the long term, we work to build leadership capacity and drive systems-level change by focusing on three fundamental things:

Provider wellbeing, specifically by supporting strong relationships that allow clinicians to be their full, human selves
Fostering strong connections across teams, across professions, and across the wider system
Supporting health professionals to have agency, voice, and power to help drive the systems-level change that healthcare needs

Our model, Relational Leadership, is a human-centered approach to working with others that cultivates connection and awareness in order to increase belonging, collaboration, equity, and impact across health systems. We teach skills that foster work cultures where all team members or stakeholders share a greater sense of psychological safety and feel seen, heard, and valued for their perspectives and contributions.

Our vision is to have a healthcare workforce that is connected, empowered, and thriving; who can provide excellent patient care and drive the positive transformation that our healthcare system so badly needs.

Intend Health Strategies is creating a more effective, connected, and relational healthcare professionals. We believe that improving the quality of our human interactions is the most important element for catalyzing positive change — for individuals, for teams, and for the broader healthcare system.

Woven throughout our work is a commitment to engaging both students and practicing clinicians to create positive change now and in the future. Participants are from across generations and career stages, come from diverse backgrounds, and work in a range of clinical settings. Our programs are interprofessional, with participants representing over 15 health disciplines, including physicians, nurses, physical therapists, medical assistants, and more.

The learning experiences we offer are deep and transformational. We inspire healthcare clinicians and teams to be more intentional about the quality of their interactions with their peers, their team, and their patients. Our approach is also practical and actionable. We provide the roadmap and tools to ignite the relational spark so that individuals, teams, and communities can begin to connect and work more effectively together in service of better healthcare and better health.

Intend Health Strategies is committed to ongoing improvement of our programs and our organizational practices. We hold ourselves accountable in four key ways:

1. Relevance — The healthcare landscape is continually changing, the pain points clinicians encounter in practice are changing, and the national conversation around healthcare is changing. Intend Health keeps on the pulse of these ongoing changes, evolving our curriculum and content to meet the needs of the moment.

2. Reach — We seek to expand the reach of our programs, while maintaining a high-quality experience for participants. In growing our reach, we are intentional about increasing the diversity of participants, geographic locations, healthcare professions, and clinical settings.

3. Response — Based on the feedback we receive from participants, Intend Health Strategies is thoughtfully iterating and improving our programs. We are continually refining our materials to ensure participants find them meaningful, engaging, and useful.

4. Impact — We are committed to offering programs that change people’s knowledge, their behavior, and ultimately lead to improvements in performance, satisfaction, and outcomes.

Intend Health Strategies’ senior leadership team includes Brian Souza, CEO; Jane Cooper-Driver, Chief Program Officer; and Kate Hansen-Roxas, Director of Operations. The Board of Directors comprises a diverse group of leaders, with deep experience in the healthcare and nonprofit sectors. Andrew Morris-Singer, MD, Founder and Board Chair, is an Internal Medicine physician as well as a thought leader and long-time champion of primary care.

All programs are delivered by a talented team of experienced trainers, composed of practicing healthcare professionals from across the country. Trainers reflect the diversity of background, profession, expertise, and clinical setting reflected in the greater Intend Health network. Programming is delivered through a blend of virtual learning and in-person sessions, which allows us to reach more participants at a broader range of clinics, institutions, and health systems. COVID prompted us to shift even more of our programming to virtual; decisions about the specific format of each program are made collaboratively with all partners involved.

Growing out of a grassroots primary care revitalization effort launched at Harvard Medical School, Intend Health was founded as Primary Care Progress (PCP) in 2010. Since then, we have transformed from an alliance of medical school-based teams promoting primary care into a national movement — a powerful learning collaborative of current and future healthcare professionals from across disciplines and career stages.

Our work is grounded in Relational Leadership (RL), a human-centered approach to working with others that cultivates connection and awareness in order to increase belonging, collaboration, equity, and impact across health systems.

In 2017, Intend Health Strategies collaborated with Oregon Health and Science University to develop the Relational Leadership Institute (RLI). Participants progress through the semester-long program as an interprofessional and intergenerational cohort of up to 40 people. Building on success and popularity, RLI launched at two new institutions: University of North Carolina and the Relational Leadership Initiative at the University of Utah. These local RLI programs have been gaining traction and, based on evaluation findings, are having a significant positive impact on participants. As of 2019, a total of 221 interdisciplinary health professionals and trainees have participated in RLI.

As we began our second decade, in 2022 we changed our name to Intend Health Strategies. As ever, we are focused on the depth and quality of programming with our core partners: