Prioritize Patient and Clinician Needs

In many digital health product teams, misalignment between management and the team often leads to unnecessary friction. It can feel like the goals of creating a great digital health product get lost in endless debates, second-guessing, and conflicting priorities. At the heart of this problem is a lack of clear focus on a straightforward question: what do our patients and clinicians need?

Human-centered design (HCD) is a powerful framework that ensures user needs stay front and center. In digital health, this isn’t just about designing excellent interfaces or improving usability—it’s about creating alignment across the entire team to serve real-world healthcare needs. When done right, HCD helps management and product teams focus on solving the right healthcare problems. Here’s how it works.

Start with a Clear Understanding of the Problem

One common issue in digital health is that teams jump straight into designing features without fully understanding the problem they're trying to solve for clinicians, patients, or healthcare providers. This can lead to confusion and misaligned expectations, particularly risky in healthcare, where lives and outcomes are affected.

HCD emphasizes first understanding the user’s pain points, improving the workflow for overburdened nurses, and providing a seamless experience for patients managing chronic conditions. The product team should ask: What exactly are we trying to solve? Who is this solution for—clinicians, patients, caregivers, or a combination of users? Without clear answers, everyone will be working off their assumptions, and that’s where misalignment starts. Both management and the product team must be on the same page about the problem they are addressing and how it ties back to business and healthcare goals.

Define and Prioritize User Needs

Once the problem is clear, the next step is to define user needs. And not just in a vague sense—teams need to understand which needs are the most important and why, especially in a high-stakes field like healthcare. This is where prioritization comes into play. Every digital health product will involve trade-offs, and management and teams must agree on what’s most important to patients and healthcare providers.

For example, if speed and usability are more important to clinicians managing an electronic health record (EHR) system than having a wide array of extra features, then speed should take priority. Similarly, a patient-facing app might prioritize simplicity over functionality, making it easier for elderly patients to manage their health. When management and the team align on these priorities, the product strategy becomes more focused, and decision-making becomes easier.

Make User Goals a Shared Guideline

Product teams in digital health can often get caught up in internal politics or individual preferences, steering focus away from users—whether they be doctors, nurses, or patients. To prevent this, user goals should be visible and central to every decision.

Every team member—from management to the product designers—must ask themselves how this decision serves the user. In healthcare, this user might be a clinician needing faster access to patient data or a patient who struggles with a complicated medication management app. Keeping this mindset as a constant reference point ensures everyone is focused on the big picture—improving health outcomes—and minimizes distractions from less critical concerns.

Keep Communication Open and Transparent

Lack of transparency can cause frustration, especially when decisions have far-reaching impacts on healthcare. Teams can feel sidelined when management changes direction without fully explaining the reasoning behind the decision. Human-centered design demands clear communication. In digital health, where regulations and patient safety are constant considerations, clear reasoning behind decisions is essential for maintaining trust within the team.

To avoid confusion, ensure that the team is updated regularly on how decisions are made, using user research and clinical data as the foundation. For example, if a specific feature is deprioritized because it didn’t address a critical patient need, management should communicate this clearly. Transparency ensures that every team member knows how user needs and healthcare goals drive decisions.

Use Prototypes to Align Vision

Prototypes are a great tool in HCD, especially in digital health, because they make abstract ideas tangible and grounded in real healthcare scenarios. When the team creates prototypes—whether for a patient monitoring app or a clinician workflow tool—management can see, touch, and interact with early versions of the digital product. This reduces misunderstandings and allows for more productive feedback based on concrete rather than theoretical discussions.

Prototyping also allows teams to validate their ideas with actual users, such as clinicians, patients, or caregivers, before investing too much time. This early validation helps ensure that the product meets the real-world needs of healthcare users and keeps everyone aligned with the project’s goals.

Regularly Revisit Priorities and Assumptions

Even with a strong start, it’s easy for digital health teams to drift away from the user focus over time. New features might seem more exciting, or assumptions made at the beginning of the project might no longer hold up as new healthcare regulations or patient feedback emerges. That’s why regularly revisiting the original priorities and assumptions about user needs is essential.

In healthcare, the stakes are high—misaligned priorities could lead to costly product rework or, worse, a product that fails to improve health outcomes. Regularly revisiting priorities ensures that management and the team can keep the product aligned with the real-world needs of patients and clinicians. This check-in process should be built into the development cycle, ensuring that any adjustments are made thoughtfully and with updated user insights.

Human-Centered Design as a Strategic Compass

Leveraging human-centered design in digital health is not just about building a better product—it’s about creating alignment within your team to improve patient care and clinical workflows. When a shared understanding of user needs unites management and the product team, decision-making becomes more straightforward, and the product ultimately benefits care teams.

In a digital health context, human-centered design can serve as a strategic compass, guiding both day-to-day decisions and the long-term direction of the product. By focusing on the users—patients, their families, or clinicians — teams can avoid common pitfalls, stay aligned, and work together more effectively to deliver real value that improves health outcomes.