How to build tech clinicians don't hate

Thank you Healthie for sponsoring this blog post. Healthie is an API-first EHR, scheduling and engagement platform used by thousands of virtual-first care delivery organizations across 25 specialties in healthcare. Their API is used 1 billion times each month (yes, month!), and it’s your way towards a flexible tech stack that clinicians will love.

A few weeks ago, Thomas and I organized the very first CareOps Conference in Nashville. One core theme of the conference was: how can we build tech that clinicians don’t hate?

It’s no secret that clinicians generally hate the technology they need to use. And it’s also no secret that whatever you do, clinicians always continue to hate the technology they use. 

I don't blame them—most healthcare technology is inflexible, forcing clinicians to adapt their workflows to fit the system, when it should be the other way around.

That's why it's crucial to invest heavily in making clinicians love your technology stack.  Studies show that clinicians often spend two minutes on EHR documentation for every minute of direct patient care. If you can make those two minutes more intuitive, or entirely automate the work, the upcoming minutes of patient care will be so much better.

Excellent tech = happy clinicians = excellent patient care.

Let’s dive into 5 tips to make clinicians fall in love with your product team, kudos to Erica Jain (CEO & Founder of Healthie), Kyle Munkittrick (healthcare OG product leader) and all CareOps Con attendees for influencing my thoughts. 

(1) Shadow more‍

You should shadow clinicians more, and you need to do it right. Shadowing isn’t jumping on a call and getting a walkthrough. That’s getting educated. True shadowing means blending into the background. Users might narrate initially, but real shadowing starts when they forget you’re even there. 

Shadowing is uncomfortable, so it’s often the first thing to get deprioritized. Don’t let that happen, it should be done every single week. What some do is create a “Shadowing Spreadsheet” where every PM, engineer & designer report their monthly shadowing hours. Combining this with minimum thresholds and keeping people accountable will create a strong shadowing culture. 

(2) Talk more to clinicians ‍

Erica from Healthie said it best: ”the biggest mistake we can make is not talking enough to clinicians. We need to build technology that clinicians love, and constantly be figuring out how to make experiences better.”

Healthcare processes are complex. Shadowing clinicians reveals some of this complexity, but you’ll miss nuances. Why do they do things a certain way? You need to dig deeper. Much deeper.

(3) Create your “expert panel”

You NEED clinicians on speed dial. Create a clinical expert panel for prioritizing, designing, and deploying new features. Treat them as your first alpha testers. They must understand that things will break and nothing is final.

Make it official too, as Kyle Munkittrick suggests. It’s part of their job, interview, vet, and allocate time for them to work with you.

Use a tool like ProductBoard to simplify your life. Healthie's team gathers hundreds of feedback pieces weekly, both asynchronously and during customer calls. Everyone—from product and clinical ops to success and support—reports and organizes this feedback in ProductBoard.

Healthie then takes a clinician-centric approach to organizing and prioritizing feedback. So when they develop a new feature, they already have insights from clinicians who shared their thoughts. This avoids the typical scenario where developers build something first and then ask clinicians, “Hey, what do you think of this?”. 

With ProducBoard, or a similar tool, the conversation is more, “We’ve taken your feedback and built a prototype. Would you have a few minutes to give more of your thoughts?” And clinicians will say “I’d love to!” because you acted on their feedback before asking for more.

So.. why does this work? It’s the IKEA effect. When you build something, you feel proud and rally others to use the stuff you influenced.

(4) Pick an EHR that is API-first

‍Yes, I know: a sponsored post by an API-first EHR and my recommendation is picking an API-first EHR. I sold my soul!!

No, I didn’t! I really believe in the value of API-first technology in healthcare for two reasons:

1. To make progress in healthcare, we need to enable data flow as much as possible because that’s the only way we can build beautiful clinical experiences. APIs make this possible.
2. Your care model is unique, so should your clinician UI. The only way to customize the UI is by building on top of an API-first EHR.

If you pick a non-API-first EHR, you will likely just layer video calls over the same outdated systems & processes. If you pick an API-first EHR, you can rethink processes end-to-end.

(5) Celebrate feedback

Clinicians are incredibly busy. If they're not providing feedback, it doesn't mean your tech is amazing. It likely means they're too busy to report persistent bugs they've already found workarounds for.

Some clinicians give a lot of feedback. Remember, these people are rare. Make them cool. Make them popular. Make them powerful. Show to the team that you built something amazing because of their feedback.

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Some other quick tips from Erica, Kyle and others in the CareOps community:

• Get clinicians involved from the very beginning (way before priorities have been defined).
• Leverage feature flags heavily to not overwhelm your users with constant change.
• Trust takes a lifetime to earn and can be broken in an instant. So aim to do the 10,000 little things perfectly 100% of the time, not 99%. 
• You now have low-code tools to “prototype” certain features, use this to your advantage. Show, let them click, see where they click, how they react, etc
• Be an idiot. The fastest way to check for understanding is not to say the generic thing that agrees, but get it specifically wrong. Test understanding and make them correct you immediately. Start failing today!