In the complex world of healthcare, innovation is constant. New technologies emerge daily, promising to revolutionize patient care and streamline clinical workflows. Yet all too often, these promising solutions fall short of expectations.

Why? Innovations have much to contend with to gain adoption and success in the industry: privacy concerns, business modeling, integration across siloed ecosystems. Another such issue — one that’s often overlooked yet which significantly reduces the impact of new technologies — is human-centered design in healthcare.

What Is Human-Centered Design for Healthcare?

Human-centered design is exactly what it sounds like: putting humans squarely at the center of the design process. In healthcare, this means bringing patients, clinicians, payers, and a multitude of other industry stakeholders into the conversation from the very beginning.

This human-centered design, not to be confused with human-factor design, operates with the principles of empathy and collaboration and considers the entire ecosystem in which a design will operate.

Consider, for example, a patient with diabetes who needs a wearable device connected to an app for monitoring insulin levels. To design an effective solution, we need to understand the condition, the patient, and the context in which the patient will use the device and app. We need a complete picture of the experience if we want to design a product that both functions with technical proficiency and earns widespread adoption among users.

In human-centered design, our first step is to spend time observing and speaking with the actual end-users of the product. Then, we can build a usable solution that truly meets their needs.

The primary goals — and the usual outcomes — associated with human-centered design in healthcare include improved patient outcomes, higher patient satisfaction, increased usability and adoption, and reduced costs.

The Challenges of Designing for Healthcare

Designing products for healthcare isn’t a straightforward endeavor. It isn’t as simple as elevating your branding or making your app just that little bit better.

Healthcare is a complex leviathan with layer upon layer of complication that makes optimizing product design, adoption, and utilization anything but easy.

It’s difficult to overcome a challenge you can’t see, so before we go any further, I’ll outline some of the most prominent issues that complicate the design process in healthcare.

A Complex Ecosystem

Healthcare products aren’t just for patients and doctors. The ecosystem also includes:

• Caregivers
• Clinicians and nurses
• Hospital administrators
• Insurance companies
• Healthcare policy workers

Each group has unique needs and perspectives. We have to balance many perspectives when practicing human-centered design in healthcare, such as designing for:

• Physiological outcomes
• All users, including doctors, nurses, admins, patients, insurance companies, etc.
• Policy and codes
• Operation within a broader ecosystem (hospital, enterprise, etc.)

In healthcare, of course, the patient outcomes are most important and therefore the top starting point. However, you can’t neglect the effects of a product on the other stakeholders and systems.

The Allure of New Technology

In any industry, it’s easy for product teams to become enamored with new technologies or tools. Maybe they hear about all the possibilities of generative AI and think, “We’ve got to take advantage of this technology!” The reaction is understandable, but it doesn’t produce the envisioned results.

Instead, the technology becomes a solution in search of a problem. Teams throw it at various existing products or problem spaces to see what sticks, and the result is nearly always a failure.

At Method, one of our core principles is to fall in love with the problem, not the solution. By taking a human-centered design approach, we focus first on the real problems that users face and second on the technology that addresses them.

Diversity of Users

When organizations develop new products, they typically have at least one or two end-user profiles in mind. And that’s excellent. You need to make sure you’re designing your product for real people.

Healthcare, however, is an incredibly diverse space, and it’s easy to over-focus on a small number of end-user profiles.

Human-centered design helps you incorporate diverse points of view, backgrounds, ethnicities, and cultures because you’re spending time with actual users. You can then make additions, changes, and omissions to your set of target user profiles to ensure your design meets the needs of a diverse, relevant population.

A Siloed Industry

Within healthcare, each organization or segment of an organization often focuses on its specific area. This siloed approach affects product design, with teams thinking only about their slice of the universe, not the holistic experience of the user. Consequently, we see well-intentioned, fully compliant, and technically remarkable products released to the world with little to no adoption.

Human-centered design helps avoid inefficiencies and poor user experiences by expanding the view behind product design. However, this approach isn’t always on the radar of those without a design background.

Drive for Speed to Market

In the highly competitive medtech space, there’s often immense pressure to be first to market or to release shortly after a competitor. But this drive for speed can lead to cutting corners in the design process.

As one of our healthcare clients discovered, rushing to market without adequate attention to human-centered design can have costly consequences.

Lost Time: A Consequence of Neglecting Human-Centered Design in Healthcare

Our healthcare client developed a remarkable piece of technology to help clinicians monitor and treat a debilitating neurological condition in patients. They completed the design on their own, successfully navigated the FDA process, and released the product, only to find that clinicians weren’t adopting it. In fact, clinicians were actively complaining about the product and refusing to use it.

When the company brought Method in to investigate, we found that a complex and difficult user experience was to blame. Clinicians were finding it almost impossible to effectively use the otherwise impressive technology.

Our next step was to spend time with the clinicians, patients, and nurses who interacted with the product to understand what they needed. By understanding the key tasks needed, we redesigned the interface and built new data visualizations that made the product usable in its intended context. Of course, the product then had to pass through the lengthy FDA process all over again.

Human-centered design is a “measure twice, cut once” philosophy. It might seem to slow things down initially, but it prevents costly mistakes, lost time, and rework in the long run.

Opportunities for Human-Centered Design in Healthcare

Despite the challenges above, there are exciting opportunities for human-centered design to make a real difference in healthcare:

Improving Existing Systems

Many hospitals have invested heavily in electronic medical record (EMR) systems. These foundational systems are often cumbersome to use, but they’re so deeply integrated into the fabric of organizations that pulling and replacing them isn’t a feasible solution.

Instead, we’ve started to see great success and greater potential in building custom front-ends for specific workloads on top of these EMRs, making the entire system more digestible and user-friendly, piece by piece.

For instance, companies like Abridge and Nuance employ a combination of AI and ambient listening technology to transcribe doctor-patient conversations in real time, summarize those conversations, and automatically input relevant information into the EMR. Abridge even generates patient-facing summaries of appointment conversations.

This application of technology exemplifies how new technologies can be applied in a human-centered way to solve real problems in healthcare. In this case, it addresses an enormous pain point for doctors and one of the widely acknowledged contributors to physician burnout by saving them hours and hours of paperwork.

Our Approach to Human-Centered Design in Healthcare

At Method, we start design projects by falling in love with the problem, not the solution. We then spend time with all the stakeholders who will use the product, ensuring we understand their struggles and the context surrounding them. This approach helps us build solutions that address genuine needs rather than retrofitting trendy solutions to problems that may not even exist.

We maintain a human-centric perspective from start to finish, not just during initial research. On the surface, user interviews at the outset of a project may seem sufficient. However, we find that continuous engagement with end-users throughout the development process produces the best products.

Beyond initial interviews to understand pain points and challenges, we also bring our concepts, data visualizations, and new workflow designs back to users for feedback. We ask questions like, “What’s the next action you would take on a screen like this?” This iterative process ensures we keep learning and refining our designs right up until release.

Method is a pragmatic, outcome-focused organization, which is why we champion human-centered design, especially in healthcare. It’s an approach that allows us to simplify the complex in people’s real lives.

Bridging the Gap in Healthcare Innovation With Human-Centered Design

Human-centered design in healthcare develops connective tissue between the many segments of a fragmented healthcare system. By considering the full context of how products are used — from patient interactions to physician documentation to insurance reimbursement — we can design solutions that truly meet the needs of all stakeholders.

Regardless of the product, adoption and utilization are key in the end. The most advanced technology is pointless if stakeholders don’t use it. By embracing human-centered design, we bridge the gap between innovation and adoption, creating healthcare solutions that not only push the boundaries of what’s possible but also meaningfully improve the lives of patients and healthcare providers alike.