
Creativity isn't a perk. It's the missing strategy in American healthcare.
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Creativity isn't a perk. It's the missing strategy in American healthcare.

Not on competence. On wonder.
The clinicians, leaders, and teams inside your health system went into this work because something captivated them. A question. A patient. A moment when the work felt like discovery.
That state, what I call being smitten is not a personality trait. It is a recoverable, designable condition.
And it is what I help healthcare systems build back.
"When Did You Last Make Something?" a keynote on creativity, burnout, and what healthcare has forgotten.
30, 45, or 60 minutes. Evidence-based. Opens with a story that stops the room.
Evidence-based creative wellness sessions for clinical teams, leadership groups, and patient families. Resin, clay, mixed media. Measurable outcomes. I bring everything.
A three-session cohort experience for healthcare leadership teams. Strategic + experiential. Builds creative infrastructure from the inside out.
It was Halloween. My first patient-facing workshop at Ronald McDonald House. I'd set up orange resin pumpkins, skull molds, glitter something to make the room feel different from the rest of the building.
At the last minute I added one more mold. An anatomically correct heart.
The first person to sit down looked at the whole table and reached for the heart. His son was two floors above us with a severe cardiac condition. A few minutes later a mother sat down. Her infant was hospitalized. She reached for a heart too.
At some point the father looked up. He said they really needed this. That they were grateful they could make someone something.
Not something for themselves. Someone something.
That is not a craft project. That is a father's love taking the only form available to it in that room on that afternoon. I believe that belongs inside our hospitals. Not as a perk. As infrastructure.
That workshop was the beginning of everything I'm building.
A rigorous, evidence-based argument that burnout is not only a workload crisis — it is a creativity crisis. And that healthcare systems can be deliberately designed to restore the wonder that brought clinicians to this work in the first place.
Forthcoming. Join the list to be notified at launch.
Boots to Boardroom.
Dania is a lead healthcare strategist at Michigan Medicine and the founder of The Smitten Strategist. She holds an undergraduate degree in recreational therapy, the clinical discipline that established therapeutic creative engagement as evidence-based practice.
She speaks, consults, and runs workshops at the intersection of healthcare strategy, clinician wellbeing, and the science of making things.
Michigan-made. Crafted with Love.
Views expressed are my own and do not represent Michigan Medicine or the University of Michigan.
© 2026 The Smitten Strategist. All rights reserved. Michigan-made. Crafted with Love
© 2025 The Smitten Strategist. All rights reserved. Michigan-made. Crafted with Love.
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