I’ve worked for software companies for my professional life.  Coming to work in healthcare has been eye-opening for me.

The user experience is … well, let’s be generous.  Let’s call it “challenging”.  And it’s challenging for, as far as I can tell, everyone involved.

It’s challenging for the patients themselves.  Getting care is no simple matter.  There are decisions to be made, providers to find, waiting lists lurking.  There are healthcare and wellness apps which promise to help the patient in some way.

It’s challenging for healthcare providers.  We’ve seen an explosion in everything related to healthcare.  There is an ever-increasing amount of data.  Some of it is specific to a single visit with a patient, such as the results from blood work or an MRI.  All of this data, not to mention whatever notes are jotted down or diagnoses given or prescriptions filled, are aggregated into a patient’s healthcare record.  Any given patient likely has multiple of these health records, even if you only consider that a patient probably has a different health record with their primary care physician than they do with their dentist.  Keeping up with all of this data is difficult and time-consuming.

And that’s just the medical side of it.  We haven’t touched the administrative side of matters, which involves the patients, family members or other caregivers, the patient’s insurance company ¹, administrators and office staff at the healthcare provider, and so much more.

All of this adds up to a bad user experience.  Some of the bad user experience is just annoying.  But, since we’re talking about healthcare, a bad user experience has risks far beyond annoyance.  A patient could choose to delay treatment because navigating the system just to get an appointment is too difficult and time-consuming.  A clinician could miss an important detail in the patient’s health record and prescribe the wrong treatment.  A data-entry clerk in the doctor’s office could make a typo that results in the patient’s insurance company rejecting the claim.

I’m sure you can imagine that I read “Why Health Care Tech Is Still So Bad” with much interest, and I agree with almost every word of it.  The only point that I disagree with is that it’s not enough for physicians to be unable to live without a given technology.  There are many technologies that physicians today can’t live without.  Whatever technology is part of getting the user experience of healthcare right has to make the whole process better for everyone, not just the physician.  If my doctor thinks the technology that gives her my health record is something that she can’t live without, that is almost useless to me if she refers me to another doctor who can’t access that health record.

There are too many moving parts in the system, too many stakeholders.  It’s not sufficient to get it right for just one of them.  We’ll probably get there in a piecemeal fashion, improving experiences for different sets of stakeholders at different points.  We can’t stop because we’ve gotten it right for the physician.  The user experience of healthcare goes far beyond the physician.