The more industries rely on Mobile Applications and Software Platforms, the more essential user experience (UX) design will be in any given practice. Healthcare industry, where tech tools are empowering all kinds of new solutions right now, is not the exception. Not only is it beneficial to the doctors but it improves the patient's experiences as well. Anyone involved in any stage during a healthcare cycle can benefit from UX. Now, let’s dig deep into UX design in Healthcare Software Development.
1. What Is UX Design In Healthcare?
Healthcare UX, which stands for Healthcare User Experience, is a broad term to illustrate the overall experience a user has when interacting with healthcare technologies and systems, such as Electronic Hospital Records and mobile health apps. The users mentioned can be varied, be it professionals with clinical experience, patients or even the general public. To get insights into their experiences, UX relates to how consumers interact with the application, how difficult it is to acknowledge its functionality or how it can cater to their needs.
Three criteria, including Usability, Enjoyability and Accessibility, need to be taken into consideration when describing a good healthcare UX in software development. Usability reflects the goals users can achieve when using your product while enjoyability determines whether they are satisfied with your products or not. Lastly, accessibility is about the ability to consume a product or service despite a disability, be it real (blindness) or perceived (being elderly).
2. How Is Healthcare UX Design Beneficial To Physicians?
Most hospitals all over the world have become increasingly digitized, with over 90% of medical institutions having their health information computerized within the past decade, a move that is meant to help doctors work more effectively and efficiently. However, such a newly implemented system of electronic medical records turned out to do the opposite things. This was mainly because of the poor information systems, many of which were outdated, complex, and inefficient. Moreover, it is no exaggeration to say that the software in healthcare can affect doctors' decisions, hence patients' health, and even cost lives in certain cases. Research in the US shows that medical errors are one of the leading justifications of deaths globally. To be more specific, more than 250,000 people in the US die due to medical errors every year. In such circumstances, a good healthcare UX design becomes more significant than ever before, which not only saves the physicians time but also delivers more accurate results to patients.
Firstly, clinicians have to take care of a huge number of patients, thus completing work means that they need to deal with a large amount of information including patients' medical records, test results, lab results, just to name a few. Having better UX design in software development would ensure that such information can be in better format with sound visual hierarchy and informatics principles, which helps significantly with smoothing the tasks. With this organized data, doctors can easily read the results and diagnose better, followed by better treatment for each patient. Compared to the past when they were snowed under with papers and can get misleading figures, confusing data and even mistaken medical records, UX design has come in handy for reducing any misunderstanding that may occur during the healthcare cycle.
A good UX design can help doctors a lot in checking patients' information.
Furthermore, physicians simply do not have enough time to sift through mountains of data, randomized controlled clinical trials or spend an afternoon on the phone with colleagues for every single patient. With the aforementioned sorted data thanks to UX Medical Database Software, doctors can now easily get consultation from others without having to explain in detail the medical background and conditions of the patients. Colleagues can access the resources through the UX interface, and all the information needed will be available at any point.
3. What Can A Good Healthcare UX Design Do For Patients?
Health is always a top priority for many people. However, in the hustle and bustle of life, people tend to get caught up in work to make ends meet so they have little time left to go to hospital and have a periodical check-up. This has led to the increasing number of people turning to healthcare applications as a great alternative. To provide the best services to patients, the UX becomes the must-have factor in Healthcare App Design, especially in helping improvise the usability and efficiency of the design systems. A proper healthcare UX design can contribute to creating better services for patients and making their healthcare journey less daunting.
a. Easy Communication
All industries have a number of jargons and healthcare is not the exception. Imagining that the patient is diagnosed with a result full of medical jargon, how can they be satisfied with the service? In contrast, they are seemingly confused and stressed when reading them. Therefore, a good healthcare UX design which can deliver information to customers in a clear way is the first factor that needs to be taken into consideration. Some suggested methods are making use of visuals, diagrams, just to name a few, to illustrate the patients’ diseases. Besides, after listing all of the diagnoses, healthcare applications should rank the level of risk so that patients can somehow evaluate their diseases by themselves, then decide whether they need to make an appointment with doctors or not.
b. Personalizing Healthcare Delivery
It is not seemingly strange for us to search for our symptoms on Google, for example, “Diseases related to headache” or “Why do I have a headache all morning?”. However, such practice often comes with confusion and worry because Google tends to exaggerate the symptoms. To combat the dangers of self-diagnosis, a number of healthcare apps have existed to provide better care and more informative resources for their users.
In the past, Healthcare Applications just simply took the information they already offered on the website and delivered it via mobile. However, thanks to AI and machine learning, healthcare providers now can track access to patient data and easily find out their diseases. Some accessible data often ranges from patients’ medical history to health metrics, such as steps of walking, heart rate,... This transformation not only makes apps more effective but it also serves to provide better care. Everyone’s healthcare needs are unique, so it is significant to improve the personalization of care delivery to cater to the patients’ needs.
Healthcare apps now can track patients' data to easily find out their diseases.
c. Protecting Patients’ Information
As other industries, working in the medical area requires strict regulations involving the severity and sensitivity of the information. Therefore, strict compliance with regulations such as HIPAA, or the Canadian equivalent PIPEDA, is a must-have consideration in healthcare app design. Such regulations would govern the customers’ information, how that data is attained, used and stored. Everything has to be made with the consent of customers.
To accomplish this, relying on familiar user journeys can be a good choice. Instead of introducing entirely new experiences, improving the existing UX design is likely to ensure that the app is still instinctive for the user.
4. Final Thoughts
To sum up, UX Design in Healthcare industry calls for innovation and creativity in the experience delivery while always adhering to guidelines to keep a user’s information safe. This creativity comes in the form of being able to communicate the same message, in an accessible way, using simple workflows and adhering to regulations through UX design. This can be done through reducing distractions within the software, minimizing supply chains/processes and establishing connections with the users.
If you ever wonder “How to get started with mobile app development with good healthcare UX design?” or “Which is the best Medical Software Provider?”, simply leave us a message. We have R&D in healthcare industry and strong UX desgin, which can cater to all customers’ needs. With 10+ years of experiences and hundreds of successful global projects, our SotaTek team is confident to provide you with various Web & Mobile App Development Services, especially Healthcare Software Development Service.
