Why is EHR redesign considered harder than most other healthcare UX work?
An EHR carries decades of accumulated regulatory requirements, legacy data structures, and clinical workarounds built by people who’ve long since left the organization. Redesigning it means understanding what clinicians actually do today, not just what the interface currently shows.
What’s the difference between designing the patient portal and designing the EHR itself?
The patient portal is the front door — registration, scheduling, records access, messaging — used by people with wide-ranging digital literacy and no clinical training. The EHR itself is the clinician-facing system, built for speed and accuracy under time pressure. They’re often connected but require different design instincts.
Should we redesign our whole EHR at once or take an iterative approach?
Most successful EHR projects favor iteration — a big-bang redesign risks disrupting clinical workflow that staff depend on daily. A subscription or embedded-designer model, like Eleken’s, is often better suited to incremental redesign than a large fixed-scope project.
Do we need HL7 or FHIR expertise on the design side, or is that purely an engineering concern?
Design decisions — what data displays where, how information flows between screens — are shaped by what the underlying interoperability standard actually allows. A studio with real EHR experience should understand these constraints well enough to design within them, even if the implementation itself sits with engineering.
How do we evaluate whether a studio actually understands clinical workflow, versus just claiming to?
Ask for a specific example of a workflow observation that changed a design decision — documentation burden, alert placement, order entry sequencing. A studio with real experience will have a concrete story; one without it will speak in generalities about “reducing clicks.”
What accessibility standard should a patient portal meet?
WCAG 2.1 AA is the common baseline for patient-facing healthcare software, and Section 508 applies for anything touching government health programs. Ask which standard the studio designs to by default and how they test it.
Is a subscription-model studio like Eleken riskier than a traditional fixed-scope agency for EHR work?
Not inherently — a subscription model with a trial period can actually reduce risk by letting you test the working relationship on a real screen before a longer commitment. The tradeoff is less predictability in total project cost for very large, fixed-scope redesigns.
How long does a typical EHR or patient portal redesign take?
It varies enormously by scope — a single module or workflow can take a few months, while a full legacy-EHR modernization commonly runs a year or more across multiple phases, especially when it involves live-system migration without disrupting clinical operations.
