Why does healthcare UX need a specialist instead of a general UX agency?
Healthcare carries constraints most software doesn’t — HIPAA and PHI handling, accessibility needs across a wide range of ages and abilities, and in many cases real clinical risk if a workflow confuses someone or an alert gets missed. A studio without direct healthcare reps tends to underestimate how much those constraints shape even simple screens.
What’s different about designing for patients versus designing for clinicians?
Patient-facing work has to hold up for people under stress, with wide variation in digital literacy and health status, usually on a phone. Clinician-facing work has to survive a 12-hour shift without adding to documentation burden or alert fatigue — closer to industrial UX than consumer UX in what it demands.
Do we need a HIPAA-specialist studio even at MVP stage?
Yes, if the product will ever touch protected health information. Retrofitting HIPAA-aware data handling after launch costs far more than designing for it from day one.
What does healthcare UX design typically cost?
It varies by studio tier. Startup-focused shops can scope embedded engagements in the low tens of thousands per month; studios with government or large-health-system experience carry higher minimums that reflect their compliance overhead.
Should medical device UX and patient portal UX use the same studio?
Not automatically. Anything that could be classified as Software as a Medical Device (SaMD) by the FDA involves usability engineering standards, like IEC 62366, that a portal-focused studio may not have direct experience with. Ask specifically.
What should we actually ask about accessibility?
Which WCAG conformance level they design to by default (usually AA), whether they test with real assistive-technology users or only automated scanners, and for one specific accessibility decision from past healthcare work.
Is it a problem if a studio works outside healthcare too?
Not inherently. G&Co. and Denovers both work across healthcare and other industries. What matters is whether they can point to specific, named healthcare work and talk fluently about healthcare-specific constraints — not whether healthcare is their only vertical.
How do we spot a studio that added a healthcare page rather than built healthcare depth?
Depth shows up as multiple specific case studies and fluent, unprompted talk about clinical workflow, HIPAA, and accessibility. A single “healthcare” tab sitting among a dozen other industries on the services page is the tell.