VEHR: The Visual EHR
Designing the display of patient health data over time to reveal patterns and anomolies.
Role
Product Design Lead
Skills
Data Visualization
UX Design
Design Systems
Prototyping
Team
Physician-founder Front-end engineers Data engineers
Summary
I worked closely with a practicing physician frustrated by the inefficiencies and cognitive burden of current EHRs. The second-generation EHR that I helped create with him replaces tabbed, source-oriented data structures with problem-oriented timelines for efficient and effective chart review.
Mapping how clinicians actually think
Interviewed physicians and analyzed real-world artifacts to uncover cognitive workflows and define evidence-based product requirements.
Physician-driven design
Built interactive prototypes around a timeline-based model and iterated closely with the physician-founder to align with real clinical reasoning.
Scalable design system
Created a lean Figma design system with reusable components tailored to complex medical workflows and engineering constraints.
Framer is a design tool that allows you to design websites on a freeform canvas, and then publish them as websites with a single click.
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
The Situation
The Challenge
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.
The Resulting Problem
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
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.
Impaired Decision-Making:
The inability to access and synthesize information easily leads to missed patterns, errors, and delayed diagnoses or treatments
Design & Handoff
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