Interviews with the designers, researchers, and product leaders shaping digital health — from patient apps and clinician tools to the EHRs everyone loves to hate.

Good design in healthcare has to survive what consumer products never face: regulation, clinical workflows, patient safety, and the competing needs of everyone in the room. Each episode is a focused conversation with someone doing that work — one guest, one topic, one close look at where the way a system is built collides with what the people who use it actually need. Patients, clinicians, caregivers. Real people, not just users.

Whether you already work in healthcare UX or you're trying to break into it, this show is about learning the craft: how experienced designers navigate the constraints, what they've shipped, what they've had to concede, and what they wish the field would finally fix. Every conversation ends the same way — with the one fix our guest is tired of waiting for.

Hosted by Kelly Smith. Find more at kellysmith.me/healthcareux.

In the debut episode of Healthcare UX, I’m chatting with Eric Shumake, founder of HXR Labs, who's spent 20+ years in healthcare UX research. His core argument: healthcare UX isn't regular UX with extra rules — it's a different discipline entirely, one where lives, careers, and lawsuits are on the line, not a pizza delivered to the wrong address. We dig into why clinicians are "trained out of" the very empathy designers are trained into (and how to bridge that gap), the real stakeholder hierarchy that decides what actually ships — legal, then revenue, then physicians, with designers near the bottom — and the alert-fatigue and "AI hangover" risks of bolting AI onto clinical workflows.

"Clinicians do not hate empathy. They just have a very different definition of it. The empathy we're trained into as designers is what clinicians are trained out of." -Eric Shumake

Eric also makes the case that career-changers' prior experience is an asset, not a liability, and that the fastest way into the field is to stop waiting and build something real.

You can find Eric at:

Website https://www.hxrlabs.com

LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/ericshumake/

Hosted by Kelly Smith. Find more at kellysmith.me/healthcareux.

I talk with Justin Ranton, who designs clinical AI at SmarterDX, about why the decisions that determine whether an AI product works happen upstream of the interface — not on the screen. We get into why a clearer, more convincing explanation can make a clinical AI more dangerous rather than safer; why a responsible output should keep clinicians checking instead of accepting; and where design ends and informatics and engineering begin. Along the way: automation bias, the risk hiding in tools that feel effortless, and the genomics dashboard he built on his own DNA.

"You could redesign that screen in theory forever. Better hierarchy, better typography, better empty states, and the reviewer is still going to do the same cognitive work. So when we think about designing above the interface, what that means is the decision. We move it upstream into what the structure is, what the model is asked to produce, what shape the output has to take, what counts as a complete explanation." —Justin Ranton

You can find Justin on LinkedIn

https://www.linkedin.com/in/jwranton/

Hosted by Kelly Smith. Find more at kellysmith.me/healthcareux.