After all the billions poured into digitising healthcare, one thing keeps coming back to bite: the very systems built to make clinicians’ lives easier often end up making them harder. From the constant alert pings to the never-ending documentation, these tools have quietly become one of the biggest sources of burnout, safety lapses, and turnover.
Technology was meant to save time and elevate care. Instead, it’s doing the opposite; and it’s no wonder care teams are hesitant to embrace yet another “solution.”
For years, organizations have treated this as a people problem, assuming better training or culture change would fix adoption. But if you peel back the layers, it isn’t culture that’s broken. It’s design.
Burnout as a design failure
Most health systems invest in technology to boost efficiency or unlock new capabilities. What they miss is the human endpoint – the clinician who has to deliver care while juggling those digital demands.
When tools interrupt clinical reasoning instead of supporting it, they drain energy, focus, and morale. It’s not just anecdotal. In the U.S., most physicians now spend more time wrestling with electronic health records (EHRs) than speaking with patients.
Design, however, can change that story. Studies on ambient documentation tools – AI systems that listen to consultations and automatically draft notes – show burnout rates falling from 51 per cent to 29 per cent, with many clinicians reporting they actually enjoyed their work again.
It’s not that people resist technology or lack digital skills. It’s that most systems are built around clinicians, not with them. That’s a design failure.
And part of it comes down to what we choose to measure. Many programs still celebrate uptime or adoption rates – numbers that say little about real user experience. The shift now needs to be toward what truly matters: screen time, documentation load, and cognitive strain.
When organisations start treating those as design metrics rather than operational afterthoughts, accountability moves from human endurance to system intelligence.
The shift to clinician-centered design
Too many health-tech projects still see clinicians as end-users to be trained after the fact. Clinician-centered design turns that model on its head by asking a more fundamental question: How can digital systems fit the way clinicians actually think, act, and collaborate?
This approach positions clinicians as co-authors from day one. It’s not just a procedural tweak – it’s a cultural reset. IT and innovation leaders must start viewing clinicians as design partners, not workflow “subjects.”
When this happens, something interesting unfolds. Clinicians move from being passive recipients of technology to active architects of it. That shift shows up in three ways:
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Agency: The system feels like their tool, not an imposed one.
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Trust: They’re far more likely to use and advocate for tools they helped create.
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Sustainability: Engagement doesn’t stop at launch; ownership drives ongoing improvement.
Some health systems have taken this further by creating clinician design councils or innovation labs, where doctors, nurses, and engineers collaborate in real settings. Kaiser Permanente is a strong example – its digital teams use human-centered design (HCD) principles to shape tools that genuinely improve day-to-day usability and outcomes.
This kind of shift isn’t small. It means bringing clinicians into the design vocabulary, clarifying roles like designer, clinician-designer, and facilitator, and reconciling design time with clinical workloads. The effort pays off, though.
From a leadership standpoint, the benefits are clear:
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Clinical excellence. Tools that mirror how clinicians think lead to better decisions and fewer mistakes.
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Workforce sustainability. When technology respects clinicians’ time, morale improves and attrition slows.
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Digital transformation. Without clinician buy-in, even the best systems fail to deliver meaningful ROI.
Participatory design as the path forward
If clinician-centered design is the philosophy, participatory design is the playbook. One proven method, Experience Based Co-Design (EBCD) – first developed in the U.K. and now used globally – brings together staff and service users to redesign processes based on lived experience.
While EBCD initially focused on patient experience, its principles fit perfectly for clinicians. In health IT, studies consistently show that when users and designers collaborate in workshops or simulations, systems map far better to real-world workflows.
Participatory design replaces top-down rollouts with an ongoing conversation. It turns clinicians from critics into champions and ensures that technology reflects the realities of care delivery, not just vendor assumptions.
Unfortunately, these methods are still underused. Many organisations default to vendor-driven development or advisory boards that get looped in too late. The better approach? Embed clinicians directly inside design teams and make design continuous, not a one-time requirement phase. That’s how innovation becomes part of the organisation’s DNA.
Four action steps for CXOs
To make clinician-centered design real, leaders need more than intent – they need structure. Here’s where to start:
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Build clinician design teams early. Bring together clinicians, designers, IT, and operations before contracts are signed. No system should launch without clinical sign-off on design readiness.
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Reward co-design outcomes. Bake KPIs like screen-time reduction and documentation efficiency into vendor governance. Every tool should reduce cognitive load, not add to it.
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Raise design literacy. Train CMOs, CNIOs, and senior clinicians in HCD principles so they can ask, “How does this fit into a clinician’s day?” – the question that truly determines success.
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Measure what matters. Go beyond user satisfaction. Track workflow friction, alert fatigue, and clinician turnover, and link improvements directly to design decisions.
Design as competitive advantage
As healthcare accelerates into the AI era, the winners won’t be those with the most advanced algorithms but those who design with clinicians instead of for them.
Every digital strategy is, at its core, a design strategy and every design decision signals who the system was built to serve.
The next frontier of digital health won’t be about piling on more AI or automation. It’ll be about smarter design governance – building technology that enhances human capability instead of draining it.
Health systems that embrace clinician-centered design aren’t just implementing new tools. They’re rebuilding the future of care around the people who make care possible.