Our Team
Ted Toussaint, Founder & Strategic Innovation Coach
Ted teaches, writes, and consults on healthcare innovation. His expertise lies in design thinking, strategy formulation, and lean product development applied to new care models. Ted began his healthcare career at Boston Children’s Hospital where he served the six sigma team to develop measurement systems and audit processes to improve hospital cleanliness. He then moved to Atrius Health in Boston, where he worked as a front-line improvement specialist and an Innovation Engineer. While there he helped build the Atrius Health Innovation Center and worked with teams to design new clinical care models. With Ted’s assistance, the innovation team designed and created the organization’s first home-based urgent care program, which reduced overall costs for elderly patient care by $1.5 million annually.
Since leaving the Atrius Health in 2017, Ted teaches and writes for Catalysis as innovation faculty, and coaches teams to design and develop new care models.
Adam Ward, Executive Innovation Governance Coach
Adam has knack for using powerful examples to inspire innovative action in healthcare executives while simultaneously staying grounded in the state of the business.
Adam’s past consulting clients include the US Air Force, Harvard University, Atrius Health, ThedaCare, the Veteran’s Administration, EnerSys, Lockheed Martin, the Gemological Institute of America, and Northwestern Mutual among others. He has established innovation teams, improved product development output, coached c-suites on innovation, and helped develop corporate strategies.
Previous to his consulting career, Adam served as the Product Development Strategist at GE Healthcare, reporting to the Chief Technology Officer of the $16B company. He was key in creating and implementing multiple, transformative initiatives including the Product Leader program for the twelve, Diagnostic Imaging divisions and the Disruptive Cost Workout, which saved tens of millions of dollars during its launch year and went across other GE units as the standard.
Prior to working at GE Healthcare, Adam was a Design Leader for Honda R&D Americas. He was responsible for the electrical system of vehicles, routinely leading cross-functional teams of 50+ individuals with project capital budgets more than $100M and material spend exceeding $1B annually.
Clients
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Praise
Kim Barnas - CEO, Catalysis
“As we considered innovation as part of the transformation journey, we began to work with Ted at CauseEffect. He is a brilliant teacher and coach with a dynamic personality who inspires you to think bigger and look at a problem in a way that is not limited by traditional improvement methodologies. He helped drive and develop our development value stream and innovation process at Catalysis and the results have allowed us to develop new products and delivery methods. He was flexible in understanding our cost constraints and working with us to build capability within our team. Ted is a person you want to help challenge and guide your process.”
Dawn Weeks - Director, system project management office, Gundersen Health
“Ted”s knowledge and expertise of innovation and design has been inspiring to work with. In our engagement with Ted, he has educated, mentored and partnered on the application and practice of an innovation framework that has produced great value and knowledge at an organizational level as well as the focus topic.”
Heidi Betzinger - Project Manager, Catalysis
“Ted pushes your thinking beyond what you believe you are capable of but does this in such a way that he inspires you to want to learn more about the subject at hand. He has a dynamic personality and has the ability to wear multiple hats as a teacher, coach or teammate at any given moment. Ted is a great person to work with and I would highly encourage anyone to work with him.”