From Legacy to Living Product: Creating a Vision for Next-Generation Patient Management Software
Challenge
The client had spent years building a trusted position in the healthcare software market. But the patient management system at the core of their offering was showing its age. Clinical staff, doctors, and administrators depended on it every day, across complex and fragmented workflows — and it had been built for a different era: desktop-first, relatively linear, not designed for the way healthcare professionals actually move between tasks, devices, and contexts. A fundamental rebuild was inevitable. But change of this scale, in a regulated, high-stakes environment, is hard to drive without a compelling direction. The organisation needed a vision specific enough to guide the next phase of development, and persuasive enough to bring an entire organisation along.
My Role
I led and organised a freelance design team on this engagement, covering research planning and facilitation, remote workshops with current users, and the conceptual and UX design work shaping the new version of the software.
Activities
- Multiple co-creation sessions with key stakeholders and the design team to collect, refine, and prioritise the use cases that would define the vision — focusing on specific interactions, high-frequency features, and areas of high business value
- Remote workshops with current users to surface real-world workflows, pain points, and unmet needs
- Designed with a mobile-first approach from day one, building an interface robust enough to support a fragmented journey across desktop, tablet, and mobile
- Developed a coherent interaction model allowing healthcare professionals to pick up where they left off — across devices and across time
Outcome
The vision we created gave the organisation something it had lacked: a concrete, compelling story for why change was necessary and what it could look like. Presented to stakeholders, it landed well — generating the momentum needed to move into the next phase. Over the following months, we worked through a prioritised backlog feature by feature, detailing concepts and designs with care and rigour. A close feedback loop with a community of expert users and key stakeholders ensured decisions were validated early and often. Because the software carries formal classification as a medical product, the concept development and design documentation were held to the additional standards that requires.