Designing a Healthcare Platform for Longitudinal Care

OVERVIEW

YOMI is a healthcare platform designed to support concierge medical practices by replacing fragmented, encounter-based workflows with a longitudinal, system-of-record approach to patient health.

I lead product and design for YOMI end-to-end. Unlike traditional UX engagements, this work extends beyond interface design into product definition, domain modeling, and strategic decision-making. The platform is actively used by a real medical practice to manage patients, monitor health data, and support clinical decisions.

This case study focuses on how the product evolved strategically in response to real-world constraints, clinical needs, and market realities, rather than on feature-by-feature execution.

CONTEXT & CONSTRAINTS

Concierge medicine operates very differently from traditional healthcare systems.

Key constraints included:

• No insurance billing workflows

• High-touch, long-term patient relationships

• Emphasis on prevention, monitoring, and early intervention

• Heavy reliance on external data sources such as labs and wearables

• Clinicians managing complex histories across long time horizons

Existing EMRs are optimized for billing and episodic encounters. They fragment patient history, bury signal in documentation, and require clinicians to reconstruct context manually.

YOMI’s challenge was not to “modernize an EMR UI,” but to redefine what the system should represent in the first place.

PROBLEM FRAMING

Early exploration revealed that the core issue was conceptual, not visual.

Traditional systems treat healthcare as a sequence of encounters. Concierge medicine treats healthcare as an ongoing relationship.

This raised foundational questions:

• What is the primary unit of health information?

• How should clinical history be represented over time?

• How do clinicians detect meaningful change across months or years?

• How do you reduce cognitive load without losing clinical rigor?

Answering these required product decisions before any interface decisions could be made.

STRATEGIC DECISIONS MADE

Redefining the Core Data Model: Health Events Over Encounters

One of the earliest and most consequential decisions was to abandon the concept of “encounters” as the organizing principle.

Instead, I defined health events as the core unit. Events include:

• Lab results

• Wearable data milestones

• Clinical observations

• Screenings

• Alerts and interventions

This allowed YOMI to represent health as a continuous timeline rather than a series of disconnected visits.

This decision unlocked:

• Longitudinal visibility

• Pattern recognition

• Context preservation

• A shared mental model across staff

Designing the Timeline as a Primary Interface, Not a Secondary View

The timeline is not a feature. It is the backbone of the product.

I designed the timeline to:

• Aggregate heterogeneous data sources

• Surface clinically relevant moments

• Preserve narrative context

• Support filtering by health domains such as cancer screening or metabolic health

This required careful trade-offs between density and readability. Clinicians favored information-rich views over minimalism, so the design intentionally prioritizes completeness and signal over simplicity.

Creating a Living Health Summary Instead of Static Documentation

Traditional health summaries are static documents that immediately go out of date.

I designed YOMI’s health summary as a living artifact, dynamically generated from the underlying event model. It updates automatically as new data arrives and can be exported as a PDF for sharing with patients or external providers.

This reframed documentation from a clerical task into a byproduct of good system design.

Designing for Decision Enablement, Not Just Record-Keeping

YOMI is designed to actively support clinical judgment.

Key design decisions included:

• Threshold-based alerts on wearable and lab data

• Highlighting trends rather than raw values

• Surfacing abnormal or changing metrics early

• Allowing clinicians to quickly reconstruct context before patient interactions

Success here is measured not by clicks, but by confidence and speed of clinical reasoning.

Supporting Multi-Staff Collaboration Without Task Overhead

Concierge practices involve multiple staff members interacting with the same patients.

I designed shared activity feeds where:

• Actions are visible across the team

• Read and unread status is tracked per individual

• No explicit task creation is required for routine updates

This reflects real clinical workflows, where follow-up often happens offline but awareness is critical.

To scale UX influence beyond my direct involvement, I focused on improving how work was defined upstream. As part of my workshops, I introduced a structured approach to user story composition that paired clear intent with GIVEN / WHEN / THEN acceptance criteria. This helped PMs and engineers reason about user experience earlier, before design or implementation began. This structure was quickly adopted across teams and became the default format for defining user stories and acceptance criteria.

Over time, this shifted conversations earlier in the lifecycle and reduced last-minute design escalations.

PRODUCT EVOLUTION THROUGH REAL-WORLD USE

YOMI is not a speculative concept. It is used daily by a concierge medical practice.

Because of this, product evolution has been driven by:

• Real patient data

• Live clinical workflows

• Time pressure and accountability

• Feedback from physicians and staff

The product has evolved through multiple pivots, particularly as we refined positioning for fundraising and broader market adoption. I have actively supported investor pitches, demos, and narrative reframing to align the product with market expectations without compromising its core principles.

OUTCOMES & MEASURES OF SUCCESS

Traditional SaaS metrics are not appropriate for YOMI’s stage or domain. Instead, success is measured through dependency, replacement, and decision enablement.

Notable indicators include:

• YOMI functions as the system of record for the practice

• Core workflows cannot be performed without it

• It replaces a patchwork of spreadsheets, PDFs, and manual tracking

• Clinicians rely on it to prepare for patient interactions

• It serves as the primary demo artifact in investor and customer pitches

These are strong signals of product viability in a high-risk domain.

CLIENT PERSPECTIVE

This work is conducted in close partnership with the physician running the practice, where trust, consistency, and execution quality are critical given real clinical usage.

TRADEOFFS & ONGOING TENSIONS

Several tensions remain active:

• Balancing information density with usability

• Designing for clinicians while preparing for non-clinical buyers

• Maintaining product integrity while adapting to market narratives

• Building scalable foundations without over-engineering early

These are not problems to “solve,” but constraints to navigate deliberately.

REFLECTION

YOMI has reinforced a core belief in my practice: senior design work is often about defining what the product is, not how it looks.

In complex domains, design decisions shape data models, workflows, and mental models long before they shape interfaces. The most impactful work happens upstream, where trade-offs are hardest to see and easiest to get wrong.

This project represents my transition from designing within systems to designing the systems themselves.

As the platform matured, my role increasingly shifted from hands-on execution toward guiding design direction, prioritization, and system coherence, ensuring the product could scale beyond its initial implementation.