Lead Content Developer & Strategist – Data Literacy Program
May 2024-March 2025
Building a data literacy program for a massive healthcare system means teaching everyone from surgeons to administrators why data quality matters for patient care. My role centered on creating educational content aligned with Texas DIR data stewardship principles—translating state compliance requirements into learning experiences that actually stuck.
The challenge was making data stewardship feel relevant across 25,000 staff members with completely different relationships to information. I conducted extensive UX research to understand how various roles interacted with data, then built user personas that guided our entire content strategy. The insights shaped everything from course structure to the language we used in modules.
Gamification became our not so subtle tool for driving engagement. Based on research findings, I created some charming robot character personas that helped us define and distinguish learner personas while presenting a non-judgmental, non-bias, non-hierarchical user journey map through our course curricula. These characters weren’t just cute mascots—they were strategically designed to make complex stewardship principles feel approachable and memorable. Beta testing showed that people genuinely connected with these digital guides.
A huge part of my position was centered on content architecture work in an effort to build everything as organized and scalable. I developed templates for module creation and established our Manual of Style, ensuring consistency across the dozens of courses concurrently in-flight at any given time. It was quite a challenge managing this within a team of 4 with only one writer and one instructional designer. Add to that the constant stream of grant writing, project management tasks, state and institutional level compliance work, and equal time on the AI taskforce building content around misinformation and AI in healthcare ethics – I was busy!
The end result was a program that turned data stewardship from compliance drudgery into something people understood as essential patient care.
Check out my project board to see the journey from UX research through gamification design.
Emily B Flynn 