MEDH Clinic Management System
A UX Case Study in Clinical Decision-Making
A greenfield clinical product built from research with practising clinicians, not screen documentation. I was the only designer across six months of research, decisions, and trade-offs — partnered with a Singapore-based clinical SME for domain expertise and on-the-ground research access.
The Results — Measured, Not Estimated
Measured across 20 users from 2 clinics, over 1 week of remote moderated testing. Prescription time was also reduced from a clinician-reported ~5-minute baseline.
The investor demo was approved and the full build greenlit — seed funded.
The Problem: Small Errors, Inevitable at Scale
Singapore has 2,200+ GP clinics. Most run on paper, memory, and a shared desktop from 2012. MEDH already owned a hospital product and wanted to expand into this underserved clinic market — starting from zero.
Scoped as a SaaS product from the outset — in discussion with the SME, designed to be redistributed across many clinics rather than built for a single site.
The errors this market produced weren't dramatic — a duplicate bill, a missed follow-up, the wrong patient file. Small, invisible, accumulating. In a high-volume, low-staff clinic they were inevitable, not exceptional. That was the real problem to design against.
Research: From "What to Build" to "How It's Really Done"
This was the earliest stage of a brand-new product, so I sequenced the research to move from what to build to how the work is actually done today.
The Insight That Reshaped the Product
I worked with four users across two clinics — two doctors and two clinic staff.
A clear daily rhythm surfaced in the interviews: a morning rush, lunchtime queues, and a scramble at closing — two assistants juggling 40–60 patients at once, a doctor seeing someone every 6–8 minutes, prescriptions written by hand then retyped into a legacy system.
The insight that changed the product: both doctors described starting to type mid-consultation, feeling the patient disengage, and abandoning the computer entirely. The breaking point wasn't the software — it was the physical gesture of reaching for a keyboard. That single insight drove five downstream decisions.
Three Relationships With One System
Surfaced through the doctor and staff interviews — each group defined "working" differently, and designing for one without the others would have broken the whole.
Four Principles I Held Every Decision To
The Signature Decision — Stylus Over Keyboard
How it played out
The conflict. Engineering argued handwriting recognition was risky and would blow the timeline; the safe option was structured forms with autocomplete.
The reframe. I changed the question from "can we build handwriting recognition?" to "will doctors use this at all if we don't?" — and played the research recordings in the meeting: two doctors, two accounts of abandoning typed input mid-consultation.
The resolution. A three-tier input hierarchy. It satisfied both sides — engineering got a buildable deliverable simpler than full OCR, and doctors kept their pen.
In testing, a GP who'd refused digital tools for 15 years completed the prescription flow unprompted, then asked when it would be available.
The Three-Tier Input Hierarchy
The Body Map — A Decision I Could Prove
I replaced dropdown condition codes with a tappable body silhouette: tap where it hurts, and the map surfaces conditions for that area while showing existing conditions as dots. In a within-subjects test (same 20 users, randomised order), the difference was decisive.
Doctors called the dropdown "like filing paperwork" and the body map "like showing me the patient."
The Reasoning Behind Every Screen
What Was Built — MEDH v0
User Interface
Selected screens from MEDH v0.
What I'd Do Differently Next Time
Where This Experience Applies
Like how I work? Let's build the next one.
You've just read how I think — the research, the trade-offs, the decisions I defended and the ones I'd make differently. I'm open to Lead and Senior Product Designer roles, remote, hybrid or in-office. Tell me what you're building and I'll tell you where I'd start.