Philips Experience Design

My role and responsibilities

• Lead design teams in the cardiology informatics and enterprise diagnostic informatics business unit, creating a diagnostic software platform for healthcare providers.
• Review team design work and lead agile ceremonies.
• Act as the UX advocate and representative within the businesses unit.
• Define design principles and create product vision with users and stakeholders.
• Define and create high level design modules to harmonize within Philips.
• Contribute to Philips' design system (DLS) and maintain CSS toolkit.

Most projects are confidential, but the few I can mention are shown below.

Challenges for software in healthcare

The state of software user experiences is healthcare is not something to write home about. Software usability issues in Electronic Health Record (EHR) systems are found to be a contributing factor to physician burn-out (Melnick. E.R. et al., 2020). This is not striking if we look at the average System Usability Scale score for EHR's compared to those of other benchmark products.

These systems are used increasingly during the daily routine due to billing and regulatory requirements, leading many clinicians feel like glorified data entry clerks. This is magnified by the lack of interoperability (connectivity) between systems from different vendors requiring wasteful duplicate data entry. So more and more time is spent on documenting in systems with low usability.

Now why is this still possible while we all carry around top notch experiences in our pockets? The competitive landscape is very different from that of consumer products. The products are complex and the cost of meeting regulatory requirements is large, setting a high bar for entering the market. Next to that, integrating and installing healthcare software products is very costly so this is a disincentive to change to a different solution. The product contracts span a multitude of years and are established by tendering (contract bidding), reducing competition to a small window in time. These tenders often focus on the number of features while decision makers are not the users. This lead the vendors to compete on features, trying to catch up to the competition, creating little incentive to make the experience better.

I believe this creates an opportunity to differentiate by making products with a truly great user experience.

Approach

By applying user centered design we can create large improvements to the status quo. We make experiences that solve healthcare providers problems with as little friction as possible. Ultimately this allows clinicians to focus on the patient, not the software.

Creating complex healthcare software requires deep understanding of the workflow and challenges. To create this we conduct comprehensive user research before we ideate on product ideas. To be able to de-risk the experience before we invest in development and go-to-market, we use low and high fidelity prototypes to test and improve iteratively with users. Low fidelity to verify the needs and proposition, high fidelity to get the details right and delight the user. In my view this is the only way to create user experience healthcare providers deserve.

To be able to provide this in an environment that competes largely on features we create modular experiences that can be re-used among multiple products. These sit on top of the design system as archetype application designs. This allows for a more unified experience, increased opportunity for evaluation, and a more efficient implementation.

The approach was also selected for Red Dot and iF design awards.