In 2026, after nearly 90 years, the Institute of Design was folded into Illinois Tech's School of Design & Society.
This website is an archive of the impactful and inspirational work produced by the ID community before that transition.

László Moholy-Nagy opened the New Bauhaus in Chicago in 1937, treating design as a discipline that was teachable, testable, and consequential. Nine decades on, its scope had widened from the things people use to the systems they depend on: hospitals, government agencies, classrooms, supply chains, digital platforms. Along the way, ID community members developed the published research, methods, and frameworks that designers rely on every day.

Chief among them is human-centered design: close attention to how people actually live, and advocacy for what that research reveals. It shaped designers who are comfortable with complexity and ambiguity: curious, rigorous, inclusive, and stubbornly optimistic about design's ability to change the systems that shape our lives.

To every one of them, who taught, studied, built, critiqued, and stayed late in the studio: thank you, and keep designing.

institute
of desiGn
Search

Saurabha Bhatnagar

Chief Health Officer & General Manager, Commure

Headshot of Saurabha Bhatnagar

Saurabha Bhatnagar, MD radically transforms businesses to be at the forefront of technology and healthcare. He is a leading physician executive making significant impact through his roles as senior executive, board member, advisor, and educator. With a background in computer science, human-centered design, and Lean/Six Sigma, he is at the forefront of driving healthcare industry transformations.

Saurabha has held several high-profile positions, from government to Fortune 6 to fast-growing start-ups.  As Chief Health Officer and General Manager at Commure, he has led nearly every part of the SaaS software and hardware healthtech company into a successful growth trajectory.  Prior to joining Commure, he was the Chief Medical Officer, Head of Digital and Technology at United Healthcare, a Fortune 6 company, where he played a crucial role in advancing the company’s digital transformation. While there, he also served as the Chief Medical Officer for Medicare, the largest Medicare plan in the US, serving one in five seniors. Prior to that, as a public servant in the US Department of Veteran Affairs (VA), Saurabha was the Chief of Quality, Safety, and Value (Assistant Undersecretary of Health), overseeing enterprise quality and safety operations for 160 VA medical centers and over 1,000 outpatient clinics. He also served as the Deputy Chief Medical Officer and Chief Medical Information Officer for technology modernization efforts, for which he received a meritorious commendation from the VA in 2019.

As a faculty member at Harvard Medical School for over a decade, Saurabha is a sought-after educator and teacher in the Global Executive Education and Master’s Degree programs. He is a physical medicine and rehabilitation physician with fellowship training in brain injury medicine, making him an asset to the healthcare industry. He earned a bachelor’s in Computer Science with Honors from Illinois Tech and a doctorate from Chicago Medical School-Rosalind Franklin University of Medicine & Science.