Healthcare marketers can streamline fragmented patient experiences by strategically implementing design systems, detailed brand guidelines, and clear ownership—consolidating workflows while increasing patient trust.
While digital transformation has transformed healthcare for the better, it’s brought with it an unintended side effect: fragmented patient experiences.
From finding a doctor to managing billing, patients interact with distinctly different platforms, interfaces, and tools; each with its own look and feel. This disjointed journey erodes patient trust and complicates their experience. They’re already dealing with health challenges - let’s not give them user experience challenges on top of it!
The holy grail for health systems to clinics is to create a unified experience that supports and reassures patients at every step.
The modern patient journey doesn't follow a prescribed path. And it typically spans multiple touchpoints that are based on different technologies. As a result, the customer’s experience feels fragmented.
For example, a patient’s journey could start by discovering a healthcare provider, perhaps through an ad on Google. From there, they visit the provider’s website, which may be built in a standard CMS like Drupal. Their journey continues with scheduling an appointment, which might involve yet another specialized tool for booking and sending reminder notifications like AdvancedMD. Post-appointment, they’ll interact with billing and customer portals.
When each touchpoint is so visually and functionally distinct from one another, it’s easy to confuse, overwhelm, and frustrate a patient who came to you looking for help. For example, if the appointment confirmation email has different colors and fonts from your clinic’s website, the patient might think that it’s spam or from another provider. Considering the consistency of the design of each touchpoint thoughtfully will make their journey much smoother.
Two methods for accomplishing this are building strong brand guidelines and implementing a design system. I’ll approach this with the “crawl, walk, run” sequence of sophistication.
Without any of the sophisticated tools required for the “walk” and “run” solutions, you should start at minimum by determining an individual responsible for owning the look and feel of the patient journey.
This “Patient Journey Owner” can be a marketing director or the CMO. What’s important is that everyone knows that any new element in the digital patient journey should be reviewed by them. (Ideally, this responsibility goes beyond only the digital touchpoints and encompasses how the patient receives care.)
The issue with this approach is that the individual responsible needs to vet each creative one by one. This is really time consuming and usually must fit between a battery of other responsibilities. This means they become a bottleneck to deploying anything online. That being said, it’s better than a seemingly random series of interfaces and interactions for the patient that emerges from having a void of responsibility in regards to the journey.
To avoid burnout for the “Patient Journey Owner”, we need to convert their knowledge into a documented process. You need to map the journey and standardize the design - that’s where a brand guideline comes in.
Brand guidelines serve as a blueprint for consistency in touchpoints — whether they’re digital, printed, or in person. When they’re clear and thorough, they offer little room for confusion or discrepancies.
Brand guidelines should include:
Designers and developers can use these guidelines to create a visual experience that demonstrates a consistent brand identity.
This allows the Patient Journey Owner to delegate quality control to the team and free up time to think more strategically.
However, on larger websites or ecosystems of applications, implementing this digital journey can be expensive and time-consuming. Brand guidelines alone might not be enough — you must also address the technical challenges of implementing a consistent design across multiple systems.
A design system gives developers a centralized repository of components to reuse across various platforms. Think of it as a digital library that defines visual elements and enables you to easily deploy them. This includes buttons, forms, fonts, and other elements.
Each element receives a unique identifier, allowing for quick and accurate reuse across platforms. For example, if a submit button in a billing portal needs to match the one on the contact page, you can link both to the same design instance.
The power of a design system lies in its "code once, use everywhere" approach. Instead of multiple developers having to write the same code to implement the same button in several places, they can simply reference a pre-built component from the design system. And when you need to update a component in the design system, that change automatically propagates to every instance that uses the component.
The initial design system setup requires an up-front investment, but it pays off over time due to the following benefits:
However, be aware that some platforms have limited customization options. For example, Epic's MyChart patient portal is known for a particularly rigid interface that doesn’t integrate with design systems. In cases like these, manual updates may still be necessary to maintain the experience’s consistency. This caveat means you should carefully consider the flexibility of the SAAS tools in your ecosystem before deciding to move forward with a design system.
While these limitations exist, they shouldn’t discourage you from leveraging design systems wherever possible.
A unified user experience increases patient trust. Progressively implementing a “Patient Journey Owner”, clear brand guidelines and a centralized design system form a strong foundation to build upon. Take your time implementing this step by step. The benefit for your internal team and for your patients will compound over time, especially if your system grows in complexity.
All this being said, keep in mind that a truly consistent patient experience requires more than coherent design — it goes beyond the digital and must take into account the physical patient journey as well.
