We are living in an era of rapid change. While technology has made significant advancements in the past decade, there are still many fundamental problems that remain unsolved.

While working at a health tech startup, I was surprised to learn many medical teams still rely heavily on pen and paper to record patients’ information, and different EHRs (electronic health record systems) do not talk to each other. There is an apparent gap between the tech world and the real world.

The healthcare industry has its unique challenges, such as domain knowledge, high regulation and compliance, etc. But if you are interested in breaking into this field, I would still encourage you to give it a try for one reason:

To see the true impact of product design.

Simon Pan’s early design experience resonated with mine, and he summarized the “why” in a beautiful way:

The first time I felt like I had designed something meaningful was for the Independent Living Center NSW (ILC NSW) project.—a not-for-profit government organization for allied health professionals and assistive technologies.
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This project showed me how using poorly designed technology could severely affect someone’s day-to-day. In this case, it was the staff’s ability to provide effective client care.

It’s a powerful experience when you see your design literally made people’s lives better.

One tip for designing for healthcare is to work closely with health professionals, for they will be your primary source of industry knowledge. Try not to assume anything and test your ideas with them early and often.

In today’s case studies, in addition to Simon Pan’s project, we picked one that represents daily use cases for healthcare and another one that looks into the future —— the healthcare metaverse.