What healthcare should learn from the wellness industry: design and experience can outperform even the strongest evidence
And why chronic patients today are both tired and wired.
4 years ago I wasn’t using any medical software products or devices, because, besides basic check-ups, luckily, I was in good health. But I used to go for basic medical checkups, and, as a professional trained in communication design, I always, unavoidably, paid close attention to how services, including in healthcare, were delivered.
And like any other services, those could have been good, could have been worse, or could have been better. Often, recommendations outperformed any publicity, and earned trust was there to stay.
Everything changed, though, when a close family member acquired a chronic condition.
I then realized that, for a person with an acquired chronic condition (and multiple co-pathologies), the product or service experience is much, much more than a recorded observation or an afterthought. It makes a crucial difference, a quality of life one, I would dare say, if not a life-saving one even.
For someone who has difficulty moving, gets easily tired, or has noise or emotional sensitivity, every detail matters.
From the distance you have to travel for qualitcare toto thwait timeme for a doctor’s appointment, the duration of an investigation, the comfort of the process, and the ease of using monitoring equipment.
This is why expanding access to at-home devices is being discussed more - it doesn’t just make life easier for patients, it’s also a way to take pressure off of an overburdened medical system.
Not once, I wondered:
Why, by 2025, haven’t we been able to create at-home wearable EEGs?
Why haven’t we found a better design for CPAPs?
Why is telemedicine still not an option for some clinics when it should be the norm in an (aspirational) value-based care healthcare environment? If you insist on making the *first visit in person* and reject virtual options, you risk losing that patient altogether.
(…)
I've been noticing a striking trend lately, which I think no one is a stranger of anymore: the wellnes industry is booming, with tons of hype, investment, and a market now worth $6.3 trillion.
Wellness products are growing faster, reaching more consumers, and shaping more behaviors than many clinically validated medical devices.
Why is that the case?
There’s a common dilemma I hear often from the medical innovation community: should we begin with a wellness product or commit from the start to the longer path of clinical validation?
Of course, a product backed by clinical evidence is the more credible path, both in the eyes of investors and the public, even if it comes with higher costs.
That said, wellness companies do often secure funding faster and achieve early validation more easily. Some acquire evidence. Some never do. But almost all of them have something the clinical world has chronically undervalued:
A great design.
A seamless experience.
A feeling of empowerment rather than dread.
A sense of comfort rather than fear, or clinical coldness.
(……)
One of my first thoughts at the beginning of my care journey was this:
The difference between fear,
and joy and anticipation
is what makes a healthcare system healthy.
And this belief still holds true.
Many people miss appointments, skip medications, or avoid tests - not because they’re unwilling to do so, but because they’re unable to, lacking time, access, ability, infrastructure.
Wellness products win by having a frictionless experience
Most clinical devices feel like they were designed for clinicians, not patients. They are intimidating, clunky, and bureaucratic - and often wrapped in layers of friction: uncomfortable hardware, multi-step setup, cluncks of wires, components, multi-step follow-up, and opaque results.
Meanwhile, wellness products assume the user is the priority, not the clinician or the billing system.
These products make it easy for the patient to read their own data, translating the clinical numbers into accessible language.
They mimic the consumer products and features people are familiar with (dashboards, feeds, sharing, community) and create similar experiences in healthcare.
They use behavioral science not to make people swipe next, but to nudge people to the next clinical follow-up. The next appointment. To create a habit, rather than anxiety around the medical visit.
I’m going to give you a few examples:
Clunky and opaque vs. intuitive and wearable
Sleep polygraphy devices remain bulky, wired, and tape-heavy. Apple Watch, while not at clinical accuracy for sleep apnea, provides 80% of the benefit with 5% of the friction.
While I’m not endorsing this as a clinical replacement, I’m highlighting a reality: we’ve reached a point where people expect health technologies to offer a seamless experience and elegant design. But there is a shared tension here: between clinical validation, which involves long approval cycles, and the work of designers and engineers building the next generation of user-friendly health products.
I’m pretty positive some people are willing to choose a more approachable, (even if less accurate) tool, over a clinically rigorous one they find intimidating. This is the heart of the wellness surge.
Beauty feels safer than clunkiness
Humans are wired to trust what looks beautiful and designed with intention. When a device feels outdated, people intuitively think it may also be unsafe or imprecise.
Medical devices often look like they were designed only for compliance and clinical use. “The patient will see you now,” wrote Eric Topol back in 2014, when he predicted the rise of patient empowerment and downfall of paternalistic medicine. This new generation of emerging patient-consumers who grew up with Oura and Apple Watch will see and notice.
Look at the traditional Holter monitor: a tangle of wires, adhesive patches, and a box clipped to your belt. You cannot sleep because of the noise from untangling wires; it is movement-restricting and uncomfortable. When I managed to rent one, the device showed up in rough shape, and it wouldn’t even stay attached.
And also look at Kardia Care - a device (and a medically approved one) that brings a sleek aluminum strip you touch with two fingers. A totally different experience for the user. It does not offer the continuity of the Holter, but it offers the convenience and comfort.
I couldn’t access their network of providers to share my data, though, as I was located in a different region than what they allowed for. But I would have happily paid a monthly subscription to have access to that. Access, convenience, and multi-use.
Which takes me to the next point:
Wellness products have multiple use cases built into the product. All modular and integrated into a seamless health journey.
They start by solving a simple problem, but quickly expand into adjacent features, uncovering other needs they’re willing to meet for their growing, acquired market.
Wearables started with step counts or heart rate and now provide functional lab tests and video calls with a clinician. Gym subscriptions and meal plans. All bundled into a seamless experience.
What started with a supplement subscription now expands into microbiome testing.
For chronic patients, I cannot understate the impact of a multiple-use-case product.
These patients don’t have the ability to move quickly between specialists, appointments, cities, clinics etc.
It is tiring and often impossible for someone who cannot move independently. It’s often emotionally draining when you see “yet another specialist” or do “yet another test” while your state is not visibly improving.
A platform that offers not just all specialists in one place, but the ability for those specialists to communicate and exchange results and treatment plans, is a definite retainer for that patient.
Neurology cannot act independently of psychiatry, cardiology, or radiology. Metabolic health data is more useful with neuro-endocrine and psycho-social data.
The body doesn’t operate in silos - and neither should our health data. The real power comes from integration, not just isolated information.
If you have a patient undergoing an EEG for epileptic seizures, yet you don’t measure their sleep patterns - even if you already have the data - that means you’re only telling half the story. Missing that context isn’t just an oversight -it’s a diagnostic blind spot.
Reaching precision in health is always about data gathering and interpretation, and of course, connecting the dots. But if you move in episodic, one-time snapshots (often to optimize for volume rather than accuracy), you’re missing the point. And probably missing all the other important data points.
Wellness-first companies offer empowerment and agency
Wellness products treat consumers as partners. They have been created to give the patients, to Eric Topol’s patients, what the traditional clinical setting doesn’t: agency and empowerment. More control over their own care.
I’ve recently read an online discussion about Function Health, the hype behind it, and how it managed to raise so much funding. Those people understand experience design, read the macro-societal trend, and apply behavioral economics to their product.
While traditional blood panels are confusing to interpret, routed through outdated patient portals, and delivered without context or narrative, Function Health wraps the biomarkers into a logical narrative, a beautiful dashboard, and a sense of control over your long-term health.
Design transforms data into meaning. Meaning transforms dreadness into loyalty.
So, if you’re building in healthcare with patients in mind, take a moment to reflect:
Which product or service feels outdated for these patients, and how might you reimagine it in their favor?
Which experiences reinforce disempowerment, and which would foster agency?
Which moments create interruption, and which would favor continuity?
And most importantly, which experiences get the patient hooked in the process of committing to a lifelong journey of health and joy, rather than one defined by avoidance and, ultimately, unmanaged health challenges?