Wednesday 11 March 2026 | 10:45-11:45
Stream: Tech innovations

In healthcare, some practices persist long after the evidence against them is clear. These “zombie ideas”—guidelines, tasks, or treatments that refuse to die—consume time, resources, and energy without benefiting patients or staff. This session explores the vital work of de-implementation: how to detect and dismantle low-value practices, challenge entrenched routines, and create space for care that truly matters and build competencies and culture around de-implementation.

Through practical experiences, participants will learn how to:

• Recognize and detect “zombie ideas” that linger despite evidence.#
• Systematically identify and stop low-value guidelines and tasks, leading systematic de-implementation.
• Engage patients and staff in questioning what does not add value.
• Build a culture where removing harmful or useless practices is celebrated as progress.
  

Part 1: Design as a method: practical tools for human-centred healthcare improvement and how Generative AI can help

Design is a powerful yet underused method for solving complex healthcare challenges. In this interactive workshop, participants will learn and apply core methods of human-centred design, including empathy-building, journey mapping, ideation, and prototyping, to healthcare challenges. Participants will also discover how generative AI can strengthen design work by testing ideas quickly, refining language for clarity and accessibility, translating materials to reach diverse communities, and creating visual storyboards, images, and prototypes that make ideas tangible. Together, these approaches help build solutions that are more equitable, inclusive, and effective. Through guided, hands-on activities and real examples from emergency department improvement projects, participants will explore how design injects creativity and humanity into quality improvement (QI) work, moving healthcare forward with intention and innovation. Attendees will leave equipped with practical tools and inspiration to frame persistent problems differently, engage patients and families more deeply, and bring their ideas to life in ways that matter.

After this session, participants will be able to: 

• Describe how the core methods of human-centred design can be used in healthcare improvement work to reframe and re-imagine persistent challenges.
• Apply core methods such as empathy mapping, journey mapping, rapid prototyping.
• Use generative AI tools to test ideas, build more accessible solutions, and add creativity and humanity to QI and other improvement approaches.
  

Sasha Litwin Attending Physician in Emergency Medicine, The Hospital for Sick Children; Canada
Samuel Vaillancourt Unity Health Toronto; Canada

Part 2: Engagement at scale: using generative AI to co-create digitalisation strategies

National and regional AI strategies are crucial to focus activities and resources, but they are fast developing and struggle to keep up with the pace of adoption of emerging technologies (including AI). Many existing digitalisation strategies fail to meaningfully engage end-users in their development and, as a result, are often perceived as "top-down", leading to issues with buy-in and adoption. There is therefore now an urgent need to develop agile ways to incorporate stakeholder views and experiences. 

This session explores how generative AI (GenAI) has been used to analyse thousands of qualitative contributions from the National Health Service (NHS) AI Ambassadors network (a large national community of practice with several thousand members) to co-design a shared commitment to promote the safe adoption and implementation of AI in healthcare. Using tools like Notebook LM, we synthesised thousands of free-text responses to inform the development of a strategic framework for AI in the NHS. 
Attendees will gain insight into how GenAI can support the development of movement-led change initiatives that include large-scale sense-making, participatory design, and strategic alignment in complex systems like the NHS.

After this session, participants will be able to: 

• Understand how GenAI can be applied to analyse large-scale qualitative data in healthcare improvement contexts. 
• Learn practical skills for using GenAI as part of a Rapid Insight approach to participatory engagement and strategic planning in health systems. 
  

Rosanna Hunt Organisational Psychologist, NHS Horizons, London; UK