As a product designer, I often face complex challenges in specialised fields that require a deep understanding of industry-specific needs. Designing medical hospital software was one such challenge.
From our research, we discovered that medical practitioners and administrative staff used a combination of various outdated software and paper-based systems, which still weren’t sufficient to capture the entire patient journey and hospital administrative tasks. From that moment, we knew it wasn’t just a redesign—it was a completely new build from scratch. This gave us the freedom to rethink everything from the ground up.
Usually, hospital software follows a traditional B2B Software Design style. Its common properties are:
Dashboards and Data-Centric Interfaces: Users navigate through different sections of the dashboard to find the information they need and perform tasks.
Functional Design: The design is heavily functional, focusing on ensuring that all necessary data and functionalities are accessible, often at the expense of user experience and aesthetics.
This approach has several drawbacks:
Users must memorise how to perform their tasks by navigating distracting elements on the screen.
Each user has to undergo long hours of extensive training.
Such software is usually not flexible despite all the presented functionalities.
As a result, hospitals end up seeking additional tools to solve their needs.
All users spend additional time capturing the missing parts of a patient journey.
For Elmeas, we decided to take a different approach by following the Modern B2B Software Design style and applying the best design practices. The main differences and benefits are:
Workflow-Based Design: This approach focuses on understanding the user's tasks and workflows and designing the software to support and streamline these processes. After thorough research, we identified common workflows for each user type (nurse, doctor) and optimised for them. This resulted in:
Reduced cognitive load by eliminating unnecessary buttons and functionalities, allowing a user to perform their tasks without distractions.
A more intuitive interface with a shorter learning curve.
Empowering practitioners to focus more on patient care. Since the software is optimised for the user's workflows, it follows the user along and supports their work.
Capturing more aspects of the patient's journey through the workflows of different user types. Hence, there is no need to spend additional time documenting the missing parts.
User-Centric Design: Keeping the stakeholders' requests in mind, we applied a user-centric design, aiming to improve the overall user experience.
Interactive and Intuitive Interfaces: Modern interfaces are more interactive and intuitive.
Additionally, our research showed that while hospitals share many operational similarities, their medical requirements and specialisations can vary widely. We reflected this finding in the design. We designed an independent core module of the app and flexible, customizable modules. This ensures that the app can adapt to the dynamic needs of different hospitals.
Our journey is just beginning. With a strong foundation in place, we are committed to continuous improvement, driven by feedback from the medical community.