What does it take to redesign primary care in a way that supports not only patients, but also the people delivering care?
Dr. Rupal Badani, Chief of Innovation at Cedars-Sinai, offers a deeply personal and practical perspective on that question. Drawing on her experience as a pediatrician and healthcare leader, she explores how empathy, leadership, and operational redesign can help preserve what matters most in care: the human moments patients and families remember long after a visit is over.
Reframing the Role of Primary Care
Badani began by reflecting on how primary care has often been undervalued, even within medicine. Early in her career, she recalled describing her path as “just general pediatrics,” before coming to understand how demanding and essential primary care truly is. Far from ordinary, it requires clinicians to care for the whole person, across the full spectrum of wellness, illness, family, and life circumstances.
She then traced how the field has become steadily more complex over time. Longer life expectancy, chronic disease, expanding regulation, electronic health records, and the flood of online information have all added to the cognitive, clinical, and administrative burden on primary care physicians. The result has been a profession under increasing strain, with burnout rising and fewer trainees choosing the field.
Primary Care as a Safety Net
A turning point in Badani’s own understanding came after the sudden loss of her husband, a general internist, in 2012. In the months that followed, many of his patients shared memories not only of excellent medical care, but of the compassion, presence, and reassurance he brought to their lives. At the same time, as she navigated grief and single parenthood, Badani experienced the support of her own primary care colleagues.
Those experiences led her to see primary care as more than a clinical function. It is, as she described it, “a kind of safety net,” one that supports people through some of life’s most destabilizing moments.
Designing Better Systems for Care Teams
That insight shaped her professional mission. After moving to Los Angeles, Badani focused her career on redesigning care delivery with the belief that when organizations better support those who deliver care, the benefits extend to everyone.
Drawing on Lean principles, she described an approach centered on respect for frontline teams, continuous improvement, and the removal of unnecessary complexity. The goal is not efficiency for its own sake, but systems that protect clinicians’ time, energy, and emotional reserve. Real improvement, she argued, begins by understanding the work as it is actually lived: “Go see. Ask why. Show respect.”
Leadership is essential to making that work stick. At Cedars-Sinai, she explained, physician leaders are developed not only to manage operations, but to guide teams through change with empathy, trust, and a clear sense of mission.
A Model Built Around Everyday Care
Badani illustrated this through Cedars-Sinai’s Enhanced Primary Care model, which introduced roles such as virtualists, in-basket support teams, and patient navigators to better support clinicians in the clinic. The redesign helped create a more predictable and supportive flow to the workday, while patient satisfaction rose from the 70th percentile to above the 90th percentile and remained there for 10 months. In her framing, the model worked because it improved the experience of care for patients, physicians, and staff at the same time.
What People Remember
Badani closed with a story about her father’s hospitalization after a heart attack in Hawaii. What stayed with her family was not only the medical treatment he received, but the smaller gestures that made him feel cared for: nurses who kept his water filled without being asked, and a cardiologist who handed him a mango she had picked from her own tree because she thought he might enjoy it.
That story captured the core message of her talk. Healthcare teams do more than diagnose and treat. They shape how people experience care and what they remember from it. Better systems matter not only because they improve performance, but because they create more room for kindness, presence, and compassion, the moments that matter most.
