In traditional models, after capacity building, health practitioners typically enter the Assessment stage, gathering data and input from the target population, often in the form of a community health assessment. The corresponding design thinking mode is the Empathy mode. This mode involves the “effort to understand the way [populations] … do things and why, their physical and emotional needs, how they think about the world, and what is meaningful to them” (10). While there is overlap between Empathy and Assessment, to better adopt the Empathy approach, public health practitioners may consider combining a human-centered approach with traditional assessment.