November 4, 2025
The Usability Crisis in Healthcare Due to Poor Designs Delaying Diagnoses
Introduction to Usability Crisis in Healthcare
Healthcare technology was intended to make patient care faster, smarter, safer, and better coordinated. However, due to the lack of people-first principles, it ultimately did the opposite. For instance, electronic portals and health record platforms often end up frustrating patients with confusing layouts and poor accessibility. Furthermore, performing a simple act like messaging a provider may require several steps and/or a significant amount of time to accomplish. This results in missed test results, delayed diagnoses, and worsening health outcomes. These failures are not caused by a lack of data or medical skill, but instead by creating technology that was never built for the people for whom it was intended.
HITS understands that preventing these failures requires more than just technical compliance. It also requires human-centered design, rigorous testing, and overall reliable and secure systems that adapt to real-world use. HITS further understands that to build technology that truly works, developers need to step out of the technical world and into the real one.
Confusing Interfaces That Cost Patients Precious Time
In today’s digital health landscape, patients often depend on portals to view their lab results or to follow up on imaging orders. However, these interfaces are often difficult to navigate with their complex menus or by giving alerts in a way that patients are unable to recognize their severity. This leads to patients going weeks without realizing their serious results were uploaded online for them, and further leads to delayed care. Again, this isn’t an issue of data being missing, but rather being displayed in an ineffective way, where patients are unaware that they must take the next steps to improve their care. These usability breakdowns ultimately transfer risk from providers to patients and destroy the very trust that healthcare was supposed to protect.
HITS understands the importance of user-centered design and experience principles to ensure that systems meet real-world needs and are easy to navigate. Through iterative usability testing, we evaluate how both clinicians and patients interact with technology before it ever gets to them. Furthermore, we understand that every design choice must be validated with actual end users. This means that things like button placement to alert wording are tested in the real world so that patients have interfaces built for them. Furthermore, our quality assurance and testing engineers confirm that each workflow functions as intended and that updates do not introduce new usability or accessibility issues. This process ultimately creates intuitive, efficient, and safe interfaces where vital information is not overlooked.
Accessibility Gaps That Exclude Vulnerable Populations
Accessibility remains one of healthcare’s most prominent design blind spots. Patients with vision impairments, limited mobility, or even limited digital literacy encounter many issues with hard-to-navigate portals. These design oversights lead to missed medications, delayed follow-ups, or even a total disengagement from care.
HITS prevents this by integrating accessibility assessments and agile development throughout every project cycle. We understand the importance of accessibility testing on multiple devices and engaging diverse users during evaluation. We go beyond compliance and ensure systems are adaptable to real-world needs as part of our system reliability and testing expertise. HITS approach ensures that no patient is left behind by ensuring information is presented to them in a way that is most effective for them. We also understand the importance of process improvement and help our team communicate updates efficiently, which reduces confusion when new features are introduced. Overall, HITS pushes for proactive planning that prevents user frustration and ensures continuity of care.
The Importance of Fixing the Usability Crisis in Healthcare
The usability crisis in healthcare shows how poor design can be just as dangerous as poor medicine. This is because poor design confuses and wastes time that could have been spent actively treating patients or even preventing more serious conditions. At the end of the day, these issues don’t just waste time or money -they cost lives. HITS addresses these issues by ensuring that technology truly works for the people it serves. We do this by implementing human-centered design, system reliability testing, secure agile methods, and change management. Overall, HITS ensures that agencies deliver technology in a way that patients can trust and clinicians can depend on. This ensures that healthcare is safer, faster, and more empathetic.
HITS
HITS provides healthcare management services & works with users to develop health informatics tools that promote safe, secure, and reliable care experiences. We believe technology must be designed with empathy, accountability, transparency, and human-centered design at its core. By combining government expertise with healthcare management, we deliver collaborative, high-quality solutions across military, federal, and commercial sectors. We take pride in our services and settle for nothing other than 100% quality solutions for our clients. Having the right team assist with data sharing is crucial to encouraging collaborative and secure care. If you’re looking for the right team that delivers technology with heart, HITS is it! You can reach out to us directly at info@healthitsol.com. Check out this link if you’re interested in having a 15-minute consultation with us: https://bit.ly/3RLsRXR.