Beyond Engineering: Integrating UX for Safer and More Efficient Medical Products

There is no doubt that medical technology development requires a fleet of technical and scientific minds to prove feasibility. However, for a long time, product design in healthtech and medical device interface design was directly determined by founders’ and engineers’ vision. Their primary goals revolved around meeting specific requirements, deadlines, and completing critical features. Whenever UX considerations were taken into account, the primary focus was on minimizing patient risks. As a result, many medtech products — very often too technical and scientific —emphasize features at the expense of processes and their interactions. While the approach to patient and treatment safety is crucial, there is a notable shift towards processes centered around patients and healthcare professionals. Having assisted numerous healthtech companies in designing UX for over a decade, allow me to offer some insights on this topic.

Focus on real user needs and feedback

In the development process, it is crucial to base decisions on real user insights rather than assumptions. Rushing into product development without comprehensive user analysis often leads to solutions designed by scientists for scientists — overengineered, complex, difficult-to-navigate products, that hinder adoption and usability. 

The foundation of great UX design lies in deep understanding of end users, their profiles, needs, motivations, challenges, and preferences. Engage with patients, healthcare professionals and other stakeholders through interviews, feedback sessions and usability testing to gather unique insights on their real-life interactions and existing process. Careful study and thorough analysis of present and potential use cases will enable design and product teams to create the optimal solution architecture to accommodate a variety of context-driven UX requirements.

No matter if it is a legacy solution or an innovative device, the application of strategic UX research and human factors engineering principles from product concept through the development process helps to balance the needs of both patients and healthcare professionals, optimize usability, enhance use-safety and ease-of-use attributes, therefore reducing complexity and enhancing clarity at critical touchpoints. This approach can significantly reduce development time by identifying and addressing usability issues before launch, thus avoiding costly design changes and product recalls. Moreover, this optimization leads to time savings across administrative and clinical workflows, as well as reduced operational costs. 

Bridge existing workflows with innovative technology

Very often product companies aiming to disrupt a standard of care in a specific healthcare field don’t  have internal capabilities to correctly translate their technology into an efficient digital user experience, which often leads to overengineering. Increased technical complexity usually equals escalated project risks and costs, challenges with testing and documenting, delayed time-to-market delivery, and maintenance burden. User onboarding and training processes also get affected, as it takes much more time to understand overly complex solutions. 

A key way to overcome this challenge is to rethink the way new technology correlates with existing medical processes. Here is where the product design and UX help comes into play. 

Having a UX team onboard enables companies to bridge the existing reality and new technology, helps to identify blind spots, and encourages product teams to look at the process, technology integration, quality and safety of further person-product interactions from a different view. A solid UX approach helps to get a practical perspective on how new technology fits in with the packed workflow streams of healthcare professionals and the lives of patients. It allows a perspective on how it affects/changes spread of roles, user communication flows, and whether it matches the level of user tech literacy and existing procedure protocols. Based on this information, UX researchers and product stakeholders can analyze and discuss product functionality, prioritize specific features based on their importance, and weight in the process to ensure a smooth transition to a new technology. 

Prioritize safety

Many medical product companies start product risk management too late in the process, approaching these activities as a formal step required by FDA and other regulatory organizations. The optimal time to start documenting risk management activities begins with user needs discovery. The application of UX design techniques and HFE methods allows companies to identify potential hazardous situations early on and shape design requirements accordingly. Incorporating risk management from the onset enables product, engineering and design teams to better manage design validation and usability engineering, and enhances overall product development process.

Focus on cost-efficiency

As the healthcare landscape shifts towards cost reduction, innovation in med tech requires understanding the entire daily workflow of a solution or device in order to identify areas of opportunity. Anything from user roles spread, medical protocols workflows, to device storage space and functionality may affect cost efficiency. Consequently, this shift will require creation of different levels of interface functionality based on user roles and includes restricting access to procedural protocols for various user groups. 

Additionally, the shift from a hospital-centered model to a more distributed care network in healthcare, requires medical devices to be adaptable for both clinical and nonclinical settings, catering to a broader range of users and environments. Usability engineering becomes a crucial element in understanding potential environments and users, ensuring devices remain effective and safe across various settings, and anticipating how devices might be used differently than initially intended, such as in home settings by patients or caregivers.

A common strategy here involves the implementation of tiered interface functionality, tailored to different user groups. By segmenting users based on their skill level and responsibilities, role and the scope of tasks, and their purpose within a medical protocol, interfaces can offer varying levels of operability. This measure not only enhances compliance but also streamlines operations by allowing each user group to focus on their specific responsibilities. For instance, medical technicians may be granted access to basic setup and operational controls for daily tasks, while nurses can concentrate on monitoring critical parameters without the need to navigate complex operational controls.

Conclusion

The integration of UX design in the development process of medical products is essential for creating solutions that are both technically advanced and user-friendly. Effective UX design goes beyond basic functionality. It addresses real-world challenges and ensures that the needs of both patients and healthcare professionals are met. Bridging the gap between innovative technology and existing workflows, and prioritizing safety from the beginning, medical companies can enhance product cost efficiency and adaptability across various settings. Ultimately, a user-centered approach in healthtech design not only improves usability and safety but also optimizes the overall development process, resulting in better patient outcomes and streamlined healthcare operations.

Photo: Yuichiro Chino, Getty Images

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