India has seen a healthy growth in the digital and technological front over the last decade. According to Mckinsey, India is the second fastest digitising economy in the world. With the availability of cheaper internet services and affordable smartphones at people’s disposal, there has been a boom in different and unconventional sectors. 

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One such sector has been the Healthcare sector, which has benefited from this digital evolution in an unprecedented way. Right from remote consultancy, online prescriptions to automation for diagnostic methodology, the sector has seen a lot of changes lately. Some experts predict that we will see a lot more changes in the near future and people will adapt to these changes with equal challenges and opportunities. 

With such escalating technological interventions on the horizon, it is only natural to envision a world where our healthcare professionals and patients both have a better experience in this regard.

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Talking about the healthcare professionals, according to a report in the New Yorker by Atul Gawande titled “Why doctors hate computers”, he makes a compelling argument that whilst digitisation promises to make medical care easier and more efficient, are screens actually coming between doctors and patients? Come to think of it, screens have become a necessity for doctors and medical professionals in today’s scenario in one way or the other. India too, has come a long way from its days of registers and notebooks and unmanageable files collecting dust, today we talk about databases, cloud and integrated screens for a significant chunk of our healthcare system. But how efficient are these screens and have they made the lives of these already time crunched doctors any more difficult than it always was? The answer is unfortunately unknown but based on observations and personal experiences, it inclines towards the dreaded YES. 

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If that is the case, that just serves as a big opportunity for design thinking and design led industries to provide human centric solutions. This is the situation where Healthcare UX and Healthcare Design will come handy.

 

UX has the ability to begin designing the information and structuring an interface so the information is delivered at the point of need and healthcare design in itself encompasses everything, right from the problem addressing to executing in all planes- information designing for the healthcare professionals to experience designing for the patients. 

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Talking about the other end of the spectrum, i.e- patient experience, although very obvious but, designing for healthcare is a very different experience than designing for any other industry. First of all, this is a need based arrangement. A person doesn’t browse through a healthcare system because he wants to, it always arises based on a need, hence the approach has to be very to-the-point yet sensitive.

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Care should be taken to understand and fulfil the person’s immediate requirements above anything else. One might already be very tense and fearful when he seeks for a healthcare provider, so the least one can do is make a platform where his fear and anxiety doesn’t escalate. Hence, healthcare design is sensible and sensitive at the same time. 

 

The stakeholders are many and the approach for them slightly different. That is a constant challenge for platforms which connect both these stakeholders- the balance. 

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As challenging it all might seem, the opportunity to create and design is immense and it takes a visionary approach to see, understand and deliver them. From our experience while researching for an online health consultancy platform, we found out many significant insights from both the perspectives of the healthcare professional and the patient. The significant insight that was understood was that the former needed an easy, fuss-free interface with minimum distractions- for which the information hierarchy needed to be designed in a way that enabled speed, less cognitive load on the healthcare professional; where as the patients wanted more easy to access sections, assurance and trust on the medical professionals, which led to designing a high valued and well designed product to gain that level of trust among other smaller but significant aspects. 

 

Design has proven beneficial in many industries and Indian healthcare has just started adopting design as one of its pillars but for design to work effectively and efficiently, it is important to understand the value design can bring to this industry. It took a number of decades for nurses and pharmacists to carve out their niche in the profession. As designers, we will need to carve out our own niche with design becoming a greater part of care delivery. We have to move beyond designing a feature, a product or even a singular experience. We need to change our approach and begin designing systems of care.

The more we move towards a system of care, the more we can serve the industry in multi faceted ways. We have the power to change the current scenario and truly mark a difference on how design is viewed and what design can achieve in this sector. As Indian healthcare system grows and evolves, so will design.