Finding a digital industry transformation that does not touch is hard. Healthcare is no exception, mainly because the global digital health market is valued at $211 billion and is projected to experience a CAGR of 18% until 2030.
While all the focus is on delivering top-notch patient experience through automation and streamlined workflows, they are only possible with good user interface (UI) and user experience (UX) embedded into digital healthcare products. To get an expert-like perspective, let us focus on ten key healthcare UX trends helping translate digitization into a first-class user experience.
10 Key Healthcare UX Trends
Statista indicates that mobile devices are expected to reach 18.2 billion by 2025. Besides, according to this report, 93% of primary care practitioners use various digital technologies, for instance, EMRs, across 24 nations covered in the piece. These two facts suggest a growing number of potential digital healthcare users on both sides, meaning among patients and doctors. That is why covering the ten key healthcare UX trends is essential.
The Internet of Things (IoT) and Wearable Tech
IoT and wearable tech found various niches to be adopted, including healthcare. Respectively, when covering this trend, the starting point should demonstrate the general skyrocketing IoT market size (see Fig. 1).
People often associate wearable tech with fitness trackers and contactless payment technology. However, the focus on healthcare is now a rising trend. Following the overall direction of data automation in healthcare, IoT and wearables brought new capabilities in measuring and monitoring vital signs, such as blood pressure and heart rate.
With many healthcare companies entering the wearable tech market, it becomes increasingly important to focus on exceptional UX. Naturally, without thoughtful UX healthcare service design coming with a wearable device, it becomes challenging for patients to use the technology. That makes it obsolete for healthcare professionals because IoT devices with bad UX do not offer the needed insights into patient health.
To make sure wearable devices provide insights for predictive analytics and data streaming in healthcare, focus on these UX-based aspects:
- Usability
- Simplicity
- Connectivity
- Interactions
- Accessibility
Focusing on the areas above ensures the digital product is easy to use, connects with other devices, and is accessible to people with disabilities.
Inclusive Design
This healthcare UX trend follows the more global trend for embracing inclusivity. Inclusive software product design emerges almost everywhere, from SaaS to IoT. The approach entails adopting a more broad perspective. In other words, instead of focusing on specific groups of users to design an app or other digital product, the method ensures the software product is designed to reach as many people as possible.
The vital part of a good UX for wearable tech includes the aspect of accessibility – making a product accessible to people with disabilities, which is also a part of an inclusive design. Yet, speaking of the phenomenon in greater detail and making a digital product accessible to people with disabilities, inclusivity ensures the largest possible audience can use the healthcare app. That encompasses accounting for these user characteristics:
- Age
- Gender
- Language
- Culture
- Ability
- Mental state
Remember that about 1.3 billion people worldwide experience some form of disability. At this point, by making a digital healthcare product more inclusive, you drastically expand the outreach and can have hundreds of thousands of new users onboard. So, this trend offers the best way to grow the target audience.
Healthcare Chatbots
While everyone focused on ChatGPT and Midjourney, chatbots are steadily rising in popularity (see Fig. 2).
They are built with intuitive programming, Natural Language Processing (NLP), and Artificial Intelligence (AI). These tools can help patients book appointments, access a knowledge base, and find answers to health-related inquiries without needing to speak to someone.
At the moment, chatbots are primarily used in healthcare to:
- Book doctor appointments
- Remind patients to take prescribed medications
- Check on patient health conditions
- Collect feedback to improve service provision
However, the existing chatbots need to offer a better user experience. Many of them lack user-friendliness and data safety. With proper healthcare service design introduced through consistent UX, healthcare gets interactive AI-powered chatbots taking machine-patient interaction to the next level. To understand what a top AI-powered healthcare chatbot with a great UX is all about, look at OneRemission, Youper, Babylon Health, and Florence.
Skeuomorphic Approach
This approach encompasses designing and building an app’s interface that will resemble actual objects users are familiar with. Some common examples on your phone are an alarm clock, a camera app, and email.
When adopted as a part of healthcare technology, a skeuomorphic approach makes healthcare apps much more interactive. The key objective here is to make the user experience as intuitive as possible to ensure a person needs a short period to get acquainted with your product. The critical part, this UX approach can be adapted to a broad range of healthcare technologies – from preventative healthcare solutions to mHealth apps.
The skeuomorphic approach is an excellent healthcare UX trend because it brings users closer to digital healthcare products and ensures patients do not have a manageable learning curve to learn how to use one. As a result, the services can be delivered much faster, and practitioners do not need additional support materials to ensure a user knows how to handle the new tech.
AR/VR in Healthcare
The following healthcare UX trend is a big one. The evidence dictates that the global AR/VR healthcare market is booming and expected to accelerate in the coming years (see Fig. 3).
With some innovative applications of AI in healthcare becoming more accessible and widespread, many techs like AR/VR received new computational capabilities. In short, these tools reshape how healthcare organizations conduct their business and provide services. For example, they can teach complex procedures used in preventive healthcare solutions, as well as used to work out more in-depth body scan analysis.
At the moment, AR/VR technologies are used for:
- Visualization of detailed body scans
- Increasing diagnostic accuracy
- Explaining treatments to patients
- Examining how a patient’s body reacts to a particular treatment
- Teaching how complex procedures are conducted to medical school students
Yet again, for a long time, the key issue with AR/VR was a flunky user experience and the need for user-friendliness. It is vital to adopt proper controllers to make this healthcare technology more responsive to human interaction. At the moment, AR/VR taps into the power of AI to take the technology’s computational capabilities to the next level.
To match massive processing power, UX designers ensure the greatest degree of control and responsiveness. As a result, this healthcare UX trend redefines how professionals leverage virtual reality to improve patient outcomes and prepare new generations of medical students.
Telehealth and Telemedicine
If you know how to build a good telemedicine app, you will provide better services and ensure patients in even remote areas have access to medical professionals. Also, telehealth is one of the healthcare techs rapidly becoming one of the most notable medical advances (see Fig.4).
The trend uses the power of video conferencing to transform patient-practitioner interactions. Instead of calling a front desk at a hospital, booking an appointment, and physically seeing a doctor in-person, you can have a quick video call or chat with a healthcare professional. Thus, doctors can treat patients for various conditions remotely. It saves time, money, and lives because time is essential when delivering medical treatment.
Currently, there are HIPAA-compliant healthcare apps and patient remote monitoring tools redefining medical consultations. However, as with other types of healthcare technology, having an intuitive user experience is crucial for proper telemedicine software implementation. Therefore, experienced UX designers constantly work to improve telehealth solutions.
Moreover, when telemedicine is coupled with wearable tech, the importance of great UX is even more pressing. Namely, while telehealth uses mobile technology and gets health data from wearable devices, both sides need to be intuitive and easy to use. Therefore, practitioners must learn how to deal with healthcare data through user-friendly interfaces.
In the same manner, patients coming from different age and ability groups need to be able to seamlessly use telehealth software and wearable devices to provide healthcare professionals with the information they need. So, when telehealth and IoT healthcare UX trends are brought together, it can be a game-changer for healthcare provision.
Voice Interface Solutions
As it was shown above, healthcare chatbots are getting traction at an incredible pace. It is time to mention voice interfaces, the technology granting a more extensive and faster influx of patient data. The global voice and speech recognition market is accelerating (see Fig. 5).
It means more companies will adopt this technology, and more innovations in this realm will be presented. While voice interfaces have a bright future when coupled with technologies like RPA, there is a massive market for speech and voice recognition in healthcare.
With the growing push toward automation in healthcare management, people designing voice interfaces have been tasked with making them more usable and accessible. In other words, this healthcare UX trend urges to make the technology hands-free and usable to help people with disabilities access different functions without external help. In such a case, a great UX design for a voice interface is the one making sure users:
- Do not need to touch the screen, something that proved extremely important during the COVID-19 pandemic;
- Can use the tool even if a person is blind or paralyzed;
- Conduct medical work when a healthcare professional’s hands are occupied or need to be sterile during surgery.
Notably, the biggest challenge with all the aspects of voice interfaces is HIPAA compliance. Many experts are skeptical that sufficient data privacy measures can be introduced to adopt this healthcare technology broadly. Yet, creating a HIPAA-compliant voice interface might be relatively easy with the right software provider.
Personalized mHealth Applications
Personalized medicine is another big healthcare trend. For decades, medical professionals have looked for solutions for tailored-to-individual-patients treatments. Thus, mHealth technology is closer to widespread personalized medicine. With global mHealth solutions being through the roof, there is a growing demand for this healthcare technology (see Fig.6).
mHealth apps have a broad range of adoption, from unlocking the power of preventive care to granting patients various aspects for managing their health. Besides, with the growth of cloud-based solutions, more medical professionals got access to mobile healthcare apps.
Overall, customizable mHealth apps boost patient engagement. They allow changes in drug prescriptions, doctor appointments, and notification personalization to ensure a patient will not miss an important date or forget to take a prescribed medication. So naturally, for patients to be able to use mHealth apps, these should come with a flawless UX.
Along with great UX, mHealth products must be HIPAA compliant, mainly for telehealth. As a result, this healthcare UX trend relies on bringing personalized healthcare solutions to patients by making these solutions more intuitive and easy to use.
Data Privacy and Cybersecurity
Keeping data secure and protected is one of the biggest healthcare concerns. At the moment, cybersecurity services are as relevant as ever before. One can see that with the growing healthcare cybersecurity market (see Fig.7).
In many cases, security breaches might occur if a user does not know how to navigate a software product properly. As a result, it leads to sensitive data being shared or stored in the wrong place. To bring effective cybersecurity measures, UX designers need to know how to implement those into various examples of healthcare technology.
For example, IoT devices, mHealth apps, and telehealth video conferencing solutions must have cybersecurity measures for user experience. Being HIPAA compliant and ensuring a user will not unintentionally cause a data breach are two things every healthcare provider should consider when adopting a new healthcare technology. Think of this healthcare UX trend as the bedrock of any solution mentioned so far.
FinTech Integrations
The final healthcare UX trend is unexpected. Integrating FinTech into healthcare is an ongoing trend regardless of how one might look at it. Moreover, the topic becomes even more pressing, considering that healthcare expenditures will soon take a significant chunk of nations’ GDPs (see Fig.8).
With healthcare spending anticipated to reach $6 trillion by 2027, many organizations are considering integrating FinTech into their technology. Respectively, in the past decades, a health system was often coined as a highly bureaucratic and old-school system. That applies to financial matters within the industry as well. However, as the digital transformation arrived, medical institutions turned to tech solutions to enhance billing and payment processing services.
FinTech solutions are embedded into healthcare to help manage insurance, digital payments, and credit and settlement services. That ensures a streamlining of finance-related operations within healthcare, which saves money and improves the patient experience. So naturally, you need a good UX design for different FinTech services to be implemented appropriately.
When dealing with finances, everything should be smooth and top-notch. Otherwise, patient satisfaction with services will decrease drastically. That is why this healthcare UX trend is gaining popularity. Healthcare organizations embedded FinTech services with intuitive UX and appealing UI to make patients forget they dealt with old-school bureaucratic healthcare systems.
The Bottom Line
Healthcare UX trends above make sure users can easily handle the newly adopted tech. But innovation is only possible if a target audience can use it properly. That is why UX designers work hard to bring IoT, telehealth, and voice interface solutions closer to users on both sides. Even more, new healthcare tech trends emerging in the future will rely on good UX as well. If you want to explore the trends mentioned in more detail, contact us. Our expert teams will present the ins and outs of any healthcare technology with all its components, like UX and UI.
