User Interface for Healthier Outcomes
It can make an impressive difference
At linkedcare we have been focused on the preparation of our healthcare platform for the US market.
One of the first and most important tasks we have at hand is to talk with US physicians and other practitioners to understand where we can create more value for them.
Having a product in the Portuguese market with awesome traction, after understanding the physicians day to day process and their needs (one of the faces of our platform is an EHR/EMR) we have now the opportunity to show them the Portuguese software and collect feedback.
Most of the feedback we have been receiving is extremely positive, some features are seen as blessings, there’s some stuff specific to the US market that we are missing, but the most surprising feedback was this one:
“It seems like for the first time I’m looking at a software that was developed with the physician-patient interaction in mind, and not a software with the patient almost as an afterthought of the practice-billing interaction”
We already knew how the US healthcare worked, but hearing this from a physician just made my jaw drop.
Of course we understand the need that the physicians have to bill appropriately and the severe penalties they incur if they don’t (up to jail-time), but seeing that most software vendors weren’t able to hide this, having the physician just focused on the patient, has been a surprise.
Other US doctor in a highly powerful role (enough to make the decision on EHR selection for hundreds of other doctors) told us this:
“Your UI is superb, besides looking great it’s also very intuitive. And don’t get fooled, I know how this is important from a costs standpoint. If I choose an EHR to later find out my doctors don’t like to use it or have difficulties learning how to use it, I will have to buy another”
As someone who always valued the interface (visual design, interaction design, etc.) it’s extremely rewarding to have this kind of feedback and see how our work can impact so directly people’s health.
Many times we just look at UI/UX as ways to please the user and increase adoption of our software, forgetting the huge impact on the performance of the ones using them. Bad UI’s can heavily contribute to crashing planes or to derail trains, we should aways keep this present.
Accompanied by the banking industry, it seems that healthcare has been left behind in what concerns UI and UX design, it looks like people have been afraid to change.
We, software developers and designers working in this space, must improve this, our future depends on it.
