What is Healthcare UX Design?

When we hear the word Healthcare UX or Healthcare product design what comes to our mind immediately is rules and regulations. These various regulations impact the product design usability, implementation, and data in a major way. From the design perspective, the environment in Healthcare technology is complex. Healthcare design has to take into consideration the needs of business that is profitability, of the clinicians that are the ease of use, and the patients that are the ease of use along with sensitivity. Healthcare UX or Healthcare user experience refers to the process of designing the experience of Healthcare products and services where the focus is on providing value and insights to the customer rather than on user retention. In this article, we will discuss Healthcare UX, its importance and what are the best practices in Healthcare UX.

Healthcare UX Design

What is Healthcare UX?

Healthcare UX or Healthcare user experience refers to the process of designing the experience of Healthcare products and services where the focus is on providing value and insights to the customer rather than on user retention. From the design perspective, the environment in Healthcare technology is complex. Healthcare UX takes into consideration the needs of business that is profitability, the clinicians that is the ease of use, and of patients that is the ease of use along with sensitivity.

Healthcare UX creates a lot of impact hence it must be very specifically monitored, a poorly designed product or digital interface can have immense consequences. It may lead to misreading for the customers, improper judgment, and sometimes even leads to a bad impact on the customer’s health.

Importance Of Healthcare UX

Better Clinical experience:

• Clinical experience is very important not only for the patient’s experience with the product or organization but also for his/her mental health. A patient waiting outside the emergency room or waiting for his/her test results go though a lot of stress, with a proper Healthcare UX, this stress can be reduce by a significant amount.

Reduced Errors and Miscommunications:

• Now according to a study done in 2020, miscommunication and medical errors between the medical organization and patients is the cause of about 80% of the serious medical errors. This is very concerning and the most important reason why these organization should focus on a better UX in order to convey the patient’s information and results accurately.

Enhanced credibility and trust:

• Healthcare UX directly benefits the patients and this in turn also helps the medical organization. A well designed Healthcare UX results in more trust in the eyes of the customers and by preventing the miscommunication and medical errors, the credibility of the organization also increases.

Compliance and Regulatory Importance:

• Healthcare UX is very significant because complying with the regulations of HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) is mandatory for all medical organizations. Hence with a well designed UX, organizations can ensure that they comply with regulatory requirements about data privacy, patient confidentiality, etc.

Improved Cost efficiency:

• Healthcare UX is a collection of best practices which in longer term improves the administrative efficiency and reduces the adverse medical events. A well designed medical application can also reduce the administrative costs for any organization hence Healthcare UX also improves the Cost efficiency in any organization.

Future of Healthcare User Experience Designing

The Future of Healthcare will be about decentralizing more power and information to the customers. This can be explained in the following three points:

Personalization and Customization:

• Healthcare UX has been moving towards providng more and more personalization and customization to the customer. The future of Healthcare UX will be about empowering the customers by giving them more and relevant data.

Integration of Wearable Technology and IoT:

• IoT Design or Internet of Things design refers to a process of designing the interactions for a user with an IoT device such as Smartwatches, Screens for smart cars, and other smart devices like Amazon Echo, etc. In future a major part of Healthcare equipment will use IoT design to leverage the power of smart design in hardware.

Telemedicine and Remote Care:

• Telemedicine and Remote Care has been on a boom since the covid pandemic and Healthcare is definitely moving towards more remote opportunities. Due to this shift it is pretty evident that Healthcare UX with move towards more accessible and usable design for ensuring easy in Telemedicine and Remote Care.

Best Practices to Follow

Usability over retention:

• Healthcare UX is different from designing user experience for an ordinary application, this is because healthcare products aims to provide true insights and facts while the primary aim of a normal UI/UX design is to grab the users attention. While designing Healthcare UX, make sure to provide value, ensure simplicity, usability and avoid any terms like user retention, engagement, etc.

The HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act):

• Healthcare companies in the U.S. fall under the purview of HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act). This act covers data privacy and security provisions to protect medical information. It also outlines the lawful use and maintenance of protected health information. One of the best ways to start out at Healthcare UX is to go though the HIPAA documentation.

Complying to HIPAA:

• Regulations under HIPAA generally fall into two categories – Protecting the personal records and data of patients and ensuring the all-round safety of patients caregivers and medical staff while using medical devices and applications. Make sure you ensure utmost compliance both of these points in your Healthcare UX.

UX as a part of development:

• One big mistake most of designer make in Healthcare UX is to keep the UX part at the end of the development process. Healthcare UX methodologies should not be kept as an afterthought instead they should be applied from the beginning of the design and development process this helps build a cohesive solution or product.

User Research:

• In Healthcare UX, the aim is to focus on providing information to users in simplest manner, it is a very good practice to encourage research in order to understand the users, their problems, goals and tasks are especially crucial while designing the health care product. All the insights one gets from these researches can be implemented on the UX design to fulfill the goals of the Healthcare UX.

Review and iterations:

• The design iterations must be tested and reviewed at every step ensuring that the end product closely matches user and business needs. This can be done by creating a streamlined process where at each steps the designer performs Usability and Accessibility testing with real customers.

Conclusion

It is commonly said that the health care industry is a decade behind when it comes to information technology, this shows the immense potential it carries for UX design to make an impact especially on the way humans manage their health. Healthcare UX or Healthcare user experience refers to the process of designing the experience of Healthcare products and services where the focus is on providing value and insights to the customer rather than on user retention. Healthcare UX is a huge opportunity as well as a responsibility. Make sure to follow the points we discussed in this article when you design your next healthcare product or digital interface.