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June 2025
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When people think about UX in healthcare, they often picture patient-facing apps or sleek device interfaces. But the most influential UX in healthcare is often invisible to the public: the systems clinicians use every day to deliver care.
Operational UX—the usability of internal tools, workflows, and processes—directly affects efficiency, burnout, safety, and revenue. Poor operational UX creates friction at every step of care delivery. Good operational UX unlocks speed, reduces cognitive load, and allows clinicians to spend more time with patients.
In an era where staff shortages and burnout are at crisis levels, improving operational UX isn’t optional. It’s strategic.
Healthcare workflows are notoriously complex. Yet internal software systems often:
For clinicians, this means time lost, frustration gained, and increased risk of mistakes.
Examples include:
Clinicians receive so many EHR alerts that they begin ignoring them—sometimes missing important ones.
Nurses may type the same information into multiple systems because integration is lacking.
New staff often require extensive training just to perform routine tasks in legacy systems.
These experiences shape burnout as much as workload does.
Design thinking reframes operational challenges by starting with user understanding rather than system constraints.
It follows a structured process:
Observe clinicians in real workflows: intake, charting, medication administration, discharge planning.
Shadowing often exposes dozens of micro-frictions that leadership never sees.
Identify root causes of inefficiencies.
Example: “Nurses spend 30% of shift time transcribing patient information across disconnected systems.”
Generate multiple solutions:
Build low-fidelity models—paper sketches, click-through prototypes—to test concepts quickly.
Evaluate with real users, refine, and re-test. Even small changes can produce dramatic efficiency gains.
Design teams simplify clinician tasks by:
Clinics often see measurable improvements in time savings and accuracy.
Nurse shift changes, physician consults, and interdisciplinary rounds all suffer when information is fragmented.
Redesigned handoff workflows—checklists, summaries, concise dashboards—reduce miscommunications and delays.
Digital pre-registration, automated demographic import, and single-screen intake workflows:
Focus effort where repetition magnifies impact. If a task is performed hundreds of times a day, reducing it by seconds yields massive operational gains.
Information should be organized intuitively, not scattered across tabs or hidden in dense screens.
Clinicians shouldn’t need to jump between platforms. Integration is UX.
Clinicians must have easy ways to report friction and suggest improvements.
Shadowing real workflows reveals what surveys and assumptions miss.
Streamlined workflows allow clinicians to see more patients or spend more quality time per visit.
Operational UX impacts throughput, billing accuracy, and staff resources.
Every eliminated frustration adds to clinician well-being.
Clear interfaces reduce errors in medication ordering, charting, and communication.
Healthcare organizations are under unprecedented pressure to do more with less. Improving operational UX:
The next wave of healthtech winners will not only build great products—they’ll make healthcare easier to operate.
We create human-centered solutions that drive positive outcomes for users and organisations. Let’s collaborate.
See our work
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