Meet our founder, Amy Heymans.

Bold Vision for a Better World

Amy is a human-centered strategist and futurist who believes impact driven and participatory design methods can guide us to envision and enact transformational change. As the founder and CEO of Beneficent, she focuses her passion for whole health, financial wellbeing, social impact, and sustainability to help organizations to clarify their purpose, craft a bold vision, and transform their organization in the direction of that vision. Amy is a big believer in learning and the power of community and networks to drive change. She dedicates herself to life-long learning, teaching, connecting people through events and collaborations and sharing her inspirational message of designing a better world.

Most recently, Amy served as Chief Design officer of United Healthcare, where she lead of team of 100 to help people live healthier lives and help make the health system work better for everyone. Before joining United Healthcare, she co-founded Mad*Pow in 2002 and nurtured its growth for 20 years to become a leading global strategic design consultancy focused on delivering positive social impact and business outcomes. At Mad*Pow Amy served as Chief Experience Officer, executive board member and head of growth. Her board leadership includes her contribution to An Orphan’s Dream as Vice President of the board.

Her work empowering human-centered innovation with companies across the health and finance ecosystem has helped improve the experiences they deliver both inside and outside of the organization. She founded Mad*Pow's Health Experience Design Conference in 2011 with the vision of connecting a community to discuss important topics and inspiring motivation in the direction of positive change. The Center for Health Experience Design that Amy founded in 2016 served as a continuation of that objective in forging partnerships between large organizations with shared objectives and crowdsourcing innovation in exciting possibility areas.

Amy was honored to be named one of Mass High Tech's Women to watch in 2009, BBJ and MedTechBoston “40 Under 40” in 2014, PharmaVoice Magazine's "100 Most Inspiring People" in 2018, and as an "Outstanding Woman in Business" by NHBR in 2022. As a speaker, Amy shares her vision at conferences around the world and she serves as an assistant professor in Massachusetts College of Art's Masters Program for Design and Innovation Leadership.

Expertise & Results

Amy’s purpose in life is to elevate the practice of design in the direction of impact and to love on designers, affirming their value and helping them to develop their careers. Amy’s 25 years of experience as an agency leader and design executive at the intersection of health and design enables her to add value rapidly to organizations looking to establish a purpose driven vision, to leverage design to serve people better, and to thrive and grow.

Fortune 5 Design Leader

Amy served in newly formed role as Chief Design Officer for United Healthcare, a fortune 5 company, from 2022-2023. She was inspired by the company’s mission of “improving health and making the health system work better for everyone” and was hopeful to make an impact at scale. She was responsible for stabilizing and strengthening the design practice and combining 4 disparate teams into one organizational structure that would enable design studios to effectively collaborate with business and product leaders. She secured funding and grew the team from 40 to 100 people, evolving a primarily UX focused team to include key disciplines like design research, service design, content strategy and behavior change design. Through Amy’s leadership a foundational infrastructure was established including design operations, communities of practice, cultural underpinnings like design principals and inspiration sessions to inspire learning and growth. She invested a great deal of time in mentorship and people development - helping next level design leaders chart their career path.

Entrepreneur, Agency Executive & Growth Leader

Amy co-founded & grew Mad*Pow for 20 Years in Role as Chief Experience Officer driving the company vision and GTM to achieve a size of 80 People and 17M in Revenue. She founded the health practice to a point where it represented 70% of revenue and served health organizations across the ecosystem including health systems, insurance companies, life sciences, government, and consumer health. She founded Health Experience Design Conference and Center for Health Experience Design as a catalyst for the growth of the practice and to convene a community of changemakers and visionaries across the industry. She helped Mad*Pow fortify it’s financial practice through the Financial Experience Design Conference and explore cross industry innovation via the Better Experiences Podcast. When the company was acquired in 2019, she managed integration and transition period until her exit in 2021. She oversaw growth function of the agency including sales and marketing strategy, operations, and execution. She was active in global thought leadership as a speaker and writer, attracting clients and employees to work with the company.

Academic Involvement

Amy possesses an insatiable curiousity and has a passion for learning, teaching, and mentoring. She received a Bachelor of Arts in Design Administration from University of Hartford and is an assistant professor in Mass College of Art and Design’s master's program in Design and Innovation Leadership where she teaches classes in ethics, experience design, sustainable business models, corporate social responsibility, and design leadership. She is working towards a graduate certificate from University of Houston’s futures thinking and speculative foresight program. She guest lecturers at various universities including Harvard Medical School, MIT, University of New Hampshire, Boston University, and Kent State and mentors any student who requests it, advising them on career direction, resume, portfolio and job searching.

Futures Thinking & Speculative Foresight Coursework:

Thought Leadership

As a speaker, Amy shares her vision globally at influential events such as TedX, CES, SXSW, Design Management Institute, UXPA, Mobile Health Congress, Stanford MedicineX, Health 2.0, AHIP, and HIMSS. She serves as a guest speaker for many organizations looking to energize, inspire, and train their staff and has served as a judge for hackathons and pitch contents with Rutgers, Spaulding, Mass General Brigham, Medmo, Children’s Hospital Boston, and Boston Scientific. Amy’s thought leadership has been featured in many podcasts on health and design including the podcast that she launched and hosted, The Better Experiences Podcast. Amy’s thought leadership has been cited in HHS and Alliance for Health Policy publications and she holds a patent for navigation of the health system.

Design for Dignity

As designers and innovators we have a great responsibility to protect the people we serve in terms of reducing harm but also to create experiences that lift and help people to achieve greater vibrancy in their lives. Beginning in 2022, Amy explored the intersection of ethics and design in a series of talks at conferences, on podcasts and at UHC. Amy is further exploring this theme via the Design for Dignity Conference, June 4-5, 2024 in Boston that she is co-hosting with Chris McCarthy from ILN.

Empathy Inspired Design

From 2013-2016, Amy spoke about the importance of empathy in the design process, specifically in health. She brought this messages to the DMI leadership conference, Stanford Medicine X, Center for Connected Health, HFES, and AHIP conferences as a keynote. She discussed the important of research to identify unmet needs and understand human emotion. She noted that emotion provides us with a great deal of context and information and should be considered, that we can help people avoid negative emotion and recover from it through the design of improved experiences. Our empathy and emotion can provide us with the motivation we need to make change.

Purpose Driven Design

From 2016-2019, Amy spoke about purpose driven design as a vehicle to create organizations and experiences that are good for people and good for business.  an evolution of human centered design moving in the direction of  great impact and the importance of inclusion, co-creation and collaboration across departments, organizations, and industries. She inspired designers to consider their purpose and the impact they would like to make. She spoke on this topic globally, in Oslo, Barcelona, London, Amsterdam, and Antwerp.

Designing  Future of Connection

From 2020-2022, Amy spoke about the power of finding meaning through our grief and the power of inclusion, connection, collaboration and relationship to help guide our efforts. Through her work with the HXD conference, participation in other conferences like the American Telemedicine Conference and podcasts she inspired people to transform their grief into meaning and for organizations see opportunities to rise to the challenge of making an impact with the people they serve.

Supporting and Inspiring Women

Throughout her career, Amy has been committed to speaking at women’s conferences from the Ad Association to Rock Health’s XX in Health Conference to the 3% Conference to speak up for the needs, goals, and desires of women and encourage a community of women focused on personal and professional development. She makes herself vulnerable communicating about her weaknesses, strengths and learnings throughout all aspects of her life, with the goal of building bridges of understanding, so that women will know that we are not alone in our challenge to lead a full and integrated life.

Humanizing Health Experiences

Amy has been speaking and writing about how design can help to improve health experiences for the past decade. She discusses how we can knit together an ecosystem focused on care so that the patient is not left on their own to navigate and how we can bring empathy, behavior science, an outcomes focus, and inclusive process to our organizations to improve the experiences we deliver

Conferences & Initiatives

Amy’s work empowering humanity-centered innovation with companies across the health, finance and social impact ecosystems have helped improve the experiences they deliver both inside and outside of the organization.

The Design for Dignity Conference

Amy founded the Design for Dignity Conference along with Chris McCarthy of ILN and the inaugural conference was held on June 4-5, 2024 in Boston. The conference gathered social impact transformers - the people, organizations, and initiatives that are improving our communities, our health, and our wellbeing.

The Health Experience Design Conference

Amy founded Mad*Pow's Health Experience Design Conference in 2011 and chaired the conference for 10 years with the vision of bringing a community of designers and innovators together to explore how we can improve health experiences. Conference themes included Health Equity & Inclusion, Creating cultures of innovation, Designing for Behavior Change, Digital Mental Health and more. At the conference over the years, we danced, watched live musical performances, laughed, cried, did yoga, saw a puppet show and more importantly we encouraged and inspired each other to keep going.

Conference highlights include a pivot to virtual in only 6 weeks post lockdown, and an interview with Dr. Sanjay Gupta, Chief Medical Correspondent for CNN.

The Center for Health Experience Design

The Center for Health Experience Design that Amy founded in 2016 was a community that was designed to foster connection, collaboration and learning across the health ecosystem. The CHXD forged partnerships between large organizations with shared objectives and crowdsourced innovation in exciting possibility areas. Through CHXD, many design challenges were able to be launched and managed, and workshops and learning sessions were held.

The Financial Experience Design Conference

Building upon the success of the Health Experience Design Conference, Amy founded the Financial Experience Design Conference in 2017 and co-chaired it for 4 years with the goal of bringing a community of leaders in financial services together to explore how we can design for financial security and wellbeing through design and innovation. Speakers from Fidelity, PNC Bank, Nationwide, and many other financial organizations spoke and participated and Mad*Pow published and shared research on social determinants of finance.

The Better Experiences Podcast

While at Mad*Pow she also launched and hosted the Better Experiences Podcast where she interviewed leaders in design and innovation, including Dr. Sanjay Gupta.

Awards

Amy has been honored to receive awards for her contributions as an entrepreneur and leader in health. Mad*Pow, the organization Amy co-founded earned a spot on Inc. 500's list of fastest growing privately held companies in 2009 and she was named as one of “Mass High Tech's Women to Watch” in that same year. Her passion, energy, and commitment has  been acknowledged by being named one of Ad Club Boston’s “100 Women we Admire” in 2013, one of Boston’s “40 Under 40” by the Boston Business Journal in 2014 and MedTechBoston in 2015, as one of PharmaVoice Magazine's "100 Most Inspiring People" in 2018 and most recently as an "Outstanding Woman in Business" by The New Hampshire Business Review in 2022.

You can change the world

Amy’s mother, Claire Putnicki was a huge inspiration in her life. In addition to all of the loving encouragement she provided, she taught her about empathy, service, health, wellbeing and how to live a life well lived. Amy wrote this poem for her mother when she passed in 2020.

Thank you for your love
A heart that lifted many
Your spirit lives on

In this video, Claire shares her patient story as well as a powerful message of love and hope.