Lorraine Chapman, senior director of healthcare at Macadamian, a UX design and development firm, said here at HIMSS17 that "healthcare is late to the game in terms of user experience." 

For any patients put-off by impersonal-feeling portals, or providers frustrated by ungainly user interfaces and counterintuitive workflows, that sentiment might be something of a no-brainer.

But at the half-day HIMSS17 UX Forum, designers, developers, clinicians and patient advocates put their heads together to find ways to create technology that's not just usable but "delightful" – for caregivers and patients alike.

In the kick-off session, Chapman – along with Kyra Bobinet, MD, CEO of engagedIN, her neuroscience behavior design firm, and Rick Starbuck, senior vice president of product and experience design at Change Healthcare – compared notes on how healthcare could learn from UX leaders such as Apple and Disney to create impactful and lasting demand for their products.

Past HIMSS surveys have shown significant problems with UX for clinical documentation and nursing: too many clicks required by EHRs, poor templates that affect data quality, difficulty in communicating context and reasoning and design-hampered challenges with workflow and care-coordination.

There are two components to good UX, said Bobinet. The most basic is "just to not tick people off." The other, more advanced opportunity is to elicit "delight," she said.

In an industry like healthcare, where the caregivers are often harried and patients can be distressed or frightened, that's a challenge. But beyond the obvious benefit to the end users, it has ROI for vendors said Chapman, who noted that for every $100 spent up front in product development, "the cost of fixing issues later doubles, if not triples."

Smart UX strategies "save you from wasted product development cycles, and ensure that what you produce is meeting a need," she said.

"Most of what is missing in experience design, especially as we lean more on technology," said Bobinet, is the human element. "The brain hasn't developed for chatbots and apps," she said. "So if I'm going to drive value, I'm going to have to nail this emotional design."

That's made doubly difficult in health IT, of course, where product development for clinical systems is often hamstrung by federal certification checklists.

On paper, those requirements "might look good, but with implementation it doesn't feel right," said Chapman, who noted that it's critical to "put the user at the center of the (design) framework," considering their emotional needs, workflow requirements and more.

There are three main components to product development, said Starbuck: needs, solutions and validation. "A lot of companies focus in the middle," he said, "and miss the needs and validation parts."

Key doing better is to embrace behavioral science, said Bobinet: "When you know where the brain is going to go, you don't have to spend so much time guessing or iterating."

Behavior science "is the new wave of design," she added. "It's the third leg of the stool. It's not enough to just do market research and segmentation of personas. You have to start with the science."

This article is part of our ongoing coverage of HIMSS17. Visit Destination HIMSS17 for previews, reporting live from the show floor and after the conference.

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