Healthcare is filled with smart ideas that never find their way into clinical practice. Many of them solve real problems on paper, yet never earn a place in the daily rhythm of care. The reason often has little to do with the technology itself. It comes down to how, where, and when that technology meets the people who use it. Building for the realities of care delivery means understanding not only how care teams think, but also how they move, collaborate, and make decisions under pressure.
Below are a few lessons that have guided the Vim team as we design for real-world clinical workflows, lessons that reveal what it takes to move from promising ideas to true, scalable adoption.
1. Workflow Is the Product
When a product lives inside the EHR, it becomes part of the care experience itself. Every click and every second counts. A design that interrupts, distracts, or asks care teams to switch context is one that will not last. True usability means staying invisible at the right moments and present only when needed.
Designing for healthcare means accepting that the workflow is not an accessory to the product. It is the product. A great solution is one that feels native to the environment where care teams already work, not one that asks them to go somewhere new.
2. Build for Context, Not Control
Much of legacy healthcare technology was built to manage data, not to guide decisions. But a good product surfaces what matters in context. It brings the right information forward at the right time, whether that is an open care gap, a flagged medication, or a next step in documentation.
Care teams do not need more information; they need more relevance. Designing for context requires a deep understanding of the cognitive load in a clinical visit and the ability to integrate into that flow without adding noise or burden.
3. Adoption Is About Emotion as Much as Utility
A product’s first interaction with a care team member is not technical, it is emotional. The question is always, “Will this make my day easier or harder?” Trust grows when a tool respects the time and attention of its users. It must respond quickly, behave predictably, and remove friction rather than add it.
That may sound simple, but it requires humility. Good design for care teams is about serving their needs, not showcasing ours. The best compliment a product can receive in this environment is not excitement but relief.
4. Integration Is an Exercise in Empathy
Connecting with clinical systems is as much about people as it is about APIs. Integration touches teams across engineering, compliance, and operations. Each has different constraints, incentives, and definitions of success. A technical solution that ignores those human dynamics is a fragile one..
True workflow integration respects the ecosystem it enters. It builds bridges without forcing uniformity. The goal is not control, but cooperation, and that mindset must start with design.
5. Innovation Only Matters When It Reaches the Point of Care
Healthcare has no shortage of innovation. What it lacks is delivery. The distance between an idea and a working solution in the practice is vast, and crossing it requires more than technology. It takes an understanding of trust, timing, and the delicate choreography of care delivery.
A breakthrough only becomes meaningful when it reaches the people who can act on it. The real challenge for healthcare technology is not invention, but adoption at scale in the messy, human reality of care.
A Closing Thought
Designing for clinical workflows is humbling work. It forces every product team to slow down and observe what real care looks like: the trade-offs, the interruptions, the quiet expertise that never shows up in a spec sheet.
If there is one takeaway from our experience, it is that the future of healthcare innovation will not be won by those who build the most advanced systems, but by those who design for the simplest, most human moments inside them.
