Healthcare
Patient experience design for health systems, payors, and healthcare SaaS.
The patient experience is not a feature of a portal. It is the connected experience of being routed through a health system — the bill that arrives, the message that gets missed, the screen at the front desk, the app that almost works. Significant Machine designs the patient-facing surfaces of healthcare organizations, and the design systems that make the improvements durable.
Our work is research-first, journey-mapped, and shipped through patterns the client owns afterward. We are not a vendor that disappears at the end of an engagement — we are a design partner that leaves the team better at this than we found it.
Five principles
that shape the work.
Patients are not users
Users opt in. Patients are routed in. They are anxious, time-pressured, often non-native English speakers, and frequently using the product on the worst day of their year. Designing for "users" produces software that fails patients on the days that matter most.
The portal is not the experience
The patient experience is the journey across portal, billing, communications, scheduling, and the front desk. Improving one surface without improving the others moves friction around. The win is in the seams.
Comprehension is the metric
In healthcare, an interface that looks beautiful but cannot be understood by a 72-year-old reading on a five-year-old Android is a failed interface. We design for readability, plain language, and task completion — in that order.
Design systems are the strategy
A patient experience improvement that does not get codified in a design system decays as soon as the project ends. The system is how good design becomes durable across teams, vendors, and reorgs.
Compliance is a design input, not a constraint
HIPAA, WCAG, plain-language statutes, billing transparency rules — these are not obstacles to good patient experience design. They are part of the brief. Teams that treat compliance as a designer-vs-legal fight lose both the audit and the patient.
What we do
for health systems.
Patient Journey Mapping
Acute, ambulatory, and billing journeys mapped end-to-end. Phases, touchpoints, emotional curve, breakdowns. The artifact that puts every team on the same map.
→Patient Portal & App Design
Patient-facing app and portal UX. Designed for the three tasks portals actually get used for, not the twenty-three that clinicians wish they would.
→Billing & EOB Redesign
Plain-language billing statements and EOBs grounded in readability research and tested with real patients before they ship.
→Healthcare Design Systems
Tokens, components, and patterns built for patient-facing product teams. The multiplier that makes every other improvement durable.
→CX Strategy & Advisory
Fractional CX leadership for healthcare product orgs. Embedded perspective, principal-delivered, retained monthly.
→Regional Health System — Patient Experience Design
A major regional integrated health system. Patient journey mapping across acute, ambulatory, and billing. EOB and portal redesign. A healthcare-specific design system that became the source of truth for patient-facing product development.
Read the case study →Healthcare
design, answered.
What is patient experience design?
Patient experience design is the practice of designing the patient-facing surfaces of a health system — portal, billing, scheduling, communications, in-clinic screens — as a single connected experience rather than a set of disconnected products. It draws on customer experience strategy, service design, and UX, but it is calibrated to the realities of healthcare: anxious users, regulatory constraints, accessibility-first patient populations, and design decisions that carry clinical risk.
How is healthcare CX different from B2B SaaS CX?
B2B SaaS optimizes for engagement, retention, and expansion. Healthcare CX optimizes for comprehension, task completion, and trust. Patients do not "engage" with their billing portal — they get in, finish what they came for, and leave. Designing for engagement metrics in healthcare produces overbuilt products that frustrate patients on the days that matter most.
Do you work with Epic / MyChart / Cerner?
Yes. Most US health systems run on Epic, Cerner, or similar electronic medical records platforms, and most patient portals are built on top of MyChart or equivalents. Our work usually sits in the design layer — patterns, components, plain-language standards, journey maps — and is implementation-agnostic. We have worked alongside Epic, MyChart, and custom portal teams.
Are you HIPAA-aware?
Yes. Engagements are scoped so we never need patient health information to do the work. Journey mapping, portal UX, EOB redesign, and design systems can all be done with de-identified examples and synthetic data. Where stricter access is required, we work under the client's BAA and follow their access protocols.
What size health systems do you work with?
Our experience is concentrated with mid-to-large integrated health systems — multi-hospital networks serving hundreds of thousands to millions of patients. The patterns transfer well to smaller systems and to payors and healthcare SaaS companies that build patient-facing products.
How long is a typical engagement?
Patient experience work is not a one-sprint project. A first engagement is usually 8–12 weeks (a journey map, a redesigned surface, or a design system foundation). Most evolve into multi-year retained relationships, because the design system and the journey map become living artifacts that the client needs ongoing partnership to maintain and extend.
Designing for
patients.
If you run a patient-facing surface and want it to actually work for the patient, get in touch.