Led end‑to‑end design effort, aligning cross‑functional teams and ensuring every deliverable translated clinician insights into scalable product solutions.
VEHR: The Visual EHR
VEHR Technologies is a physician-led startup founded by Dr. Cole Marolf, with a mission to reimagine the electronic health record from the ground up.
Designed to align with how clinicians actually think, VEHR helps doctors recognize clinical patterns quickly, make informed decisions, and create care plans that drive better outcomes.
Research
Mapped clinicians’ cognitive workflows through interviews and artifact reviews to surface clear, evidence‑based requirements.
Prototyping
Converted insights into interactive timeline‑based UI prototypes and iterated rapidly with clinician feedback.
Design System
Codified proven patterns into a scalable Figma design system that ensures consistency and speeds development.
Visuals from this project are under NDA and cannot be publicly shared. However, I’m able to describe the process and outcomes.
The Situation
EHR data is scattered and organized in ways that don’t match how clinicians think.
Mental Models Misalignment
Current EMRs often fail to follow this logic, disrupting clinical reasoning and forcing clinicians to adjust their workflows to the system rather than vice versa.
Fragmentation of Information
Critical patient data is often siloed across multiple modules, screens or interfaces, making it difficult to view a patient’s clinical history holistically.
Clinicians waste time hunting for data, hindering timely clinical decisions, and ultimately fueling frustration and burnout.
Decreased Efficiency
Clinicians spend more time searching for relevant data and verifying its accuracy, which detracts from time spent on direct patient care
Impaired Decision-Making
The inability to access and synthesize information easily leads to missed patterns, errors, and delayed diagnoses or treatments
Frustration and Burnout
The additional administrative burden and misalignment with clinical workflows contribute to clinician dissatisfaction and burnout
How might we uncover and map clinicians’ real-world chart-review workflows to define clear, evidence-based design requirements? |
Discovery & Mapping
To understand clinical decision-making in practice, I spoke with Cole about his clinical practice. I also reviewed (anonymized) artifacts like progress notes, printed labs, and hand-annotated timelines. These revealed how Cole mentally reconstruct patient narratives across systems, and insights that helped shape a more unified and intuitive design.
Decreased Efficiency:
I analyzed referenced recently published academic literature on medical software, much of it curated by Cole. This helped build a shared vocabulary and structure to inform the design.
Noun-foraging:
I gathered nouns and concepts from interviews, artifacts, documents, and academic research. Dr. Cole helped surface and refine the object vocabulary throughout the process.
Clinicians were overwhelmed by disjointed data in the EHR—labs, meds, notes, imaging—all buried in separate tabs with no coherent timeline. They needed a way to grasp a patient’s clinical trajectory at a glance.
Decreased Efficiency:
Clinicians spend more time searching for relevant data and verifying its accuracy, which detracts from time spent on direct patient care
Impaired Decision-Making:
The inability to access and synthesize information easily leads to missed patterns, errors, and delayed diagnoses or treatments
How might we translate workflow insights into an intuitive, longitudinal interface that surfaces key patterns and anomalies at a glance? |
Design & Handoff
After mapping, design continued as a collaborative effort. We iterated by sharing sketches and wireframes across design, clinical, and engineering partners, refining the interface through constant feedback and discussion.
Progressive Disclosure:
Early in the design process, progressive disclosure emerged as a crucial pattern for managing cognitive load. The screen shown here was revealed only after presenting patient data at a much higher level (under NDA), allowing users to drill down into specific trends (like glucose levels over time) without being overwhelmed.
I worked closely with engineering to translate design decisions into clear, actionable structures. By providing object maps, prioritized flows, and annotated wireframes, I helped a lean startup team move quickly and confidently. This support was key to getting early builds off the ground and ensuring design and development stayed aligned.
Design System:
To support consistency and scalability, I contributed to a lightweight design system tailored to our product’s needs. It established foundational styles, reusable patterns, and component behaviors that aligned with both our clinical use cases and engineering constraints.
Specialized Components:
Beyond core elements, I designed specialized components for complex workflows—like multi-state status indicators, timeline summaries, and structured data inputs. These components balanced clarity and flexibility, helping clinicians navigate dense information with minimal friction.
The Result
Equipped with the design system, detailed workflows, and a shared object model, the development team is now actively building the next stage of the EHR. The foundational design work enabled faster implementation, reduced ambiguity across teams, and ensured the product stays aligned with real clinical needs as it evolves.
"As a first time founder, David's guidance in the redesign of our innovative medical data display has been crucial.
By guiding our team through object mapping for complex processes, and translating this into high fidelity wireframe representations:
David's work greatly advanced the quality and timeline of our team's efforts."
Cole Marolf, MD
co-founder, VEHR Technologies
practicing physician