A Healthcare App Development
Company built for the day-30 user

HIPAA and security become architecture rather than features, EHR interoperability becomes core scope, and the product has to serve people whose tolerance for friction is close to zero.  Three things follow from that:  The app serves several people with different definitions of success. The patient who needs it to feel simple on a hard day. The clinician who abandons anything that adds clicks to a packed shift. The compliance officer signing off on data handling. And the executive watching whether it moves a real number. You're building into systems you don't control. Value usually depends on data living in an EHR, so an app that can't exchange data cleanly stays a demo. Real conditions aren't ideal conditions. A transporter moving a hundred pieces of equipment a shift is gloved, walking, and already late. Every second the app costs them is a scan that quietly doesn't happen, and a dashboard that slowly stops telling the truth.

Because they were built to ship rather than to be adopted, and most users are gone within about 90 days.  The patterns we see most often:  The workflow was assumed, not observed. A tool designed for how the process should work loses to the shortcut clinicians already use. Integration treated as phase two. By the time the EHR work starts, the architecture has made it expensive, and the product sits in a pilot that never expands. Trust never got established. In behavioral health especially, the experience has to earn the disclosure it asks for. Secondary research put privacy at the top of the barriers to adopting mobile health apps, at 61%, ahead of time investment at 24%. On Ellipsis Health that put the privacy explanation and a check on whether the user was somewhere comfortable ahead of the microphone, and testers called both essential rather than obstructive.

Four things move the number more than anything else:  Platform scope. One mobile app is a different problem from mobile plus a clinician web dashboard. How many integrations, and whether the systems are cooperative. FHIR-native is faster than a legacy interface. Compliance surface. The volume of PHI touched and the audit requirements attached to it. Whether hardware is involved. CompleteOR ran across four phases from 2017 to 2019 because beacon-based indoor tracking had to work before the software mattered. Ellipsis Health, software only with the model already built, ran eight weeks.  Most engagements start with a focused MVP to prove value quickly, which keeps early cost predictable and reduces the risk of building the wrong thing.

Yes, and that's the point of the model. One team owns the experience and the engineering, so there's no lossy handoff between a design agency and a separate dev shop.  We also work alongside your in-house engineers when that fits, providing design and architecture leadership through the build. On CompleteOR we owned brand and product design across both applications while our development partner built the beacon tracking system. On Ellipsis Health, which had engineers but no design function, we handed off a single-source-of-truth Figma design system organized so their front-end team could build from it rather than reinterpret it.

Yes, and it's designed that way from the first architecture decision rather than certified at the end. Encryption in transit and at rest, access controls, audit logging, HIPAA-eligible cloud with signed business associate agreements, and breach-aware design.  HIPAA is a way of building, not a certificate you buy. With the average healthcare breach now costing $7.42M, the cheapest time to get security right is before production code exists.

Yes. FHIR and SMART on FHIR, plus integrations with Epic, Cerner, and Oracle Health, are core to how we build rather than a later phase.  We design around read and write scopes, real-world data quirks, and clinician workflow, so the integration feels invisible instead of bolted on. The failure mode is an app that technically connects but forces a clinician to reconcile two systems in their head.

Yes, including clinician dashboards and patient portals, and we help you choose the platform strategy rather than defaulting to one stack.  Sequencing matters as much as platform. On CompleteOR we shipped the mobile app first, put it into the market for real testing, then designed the manager's dashboard with what we'd learned. Ellipsis Health ran adaptive mobile and tablet across iOS and Android from one system.

By recruiting the actual people, which is usually the hard part rather than the research itself.  For Ellipsis Health we ran eleven depth interviews across three generational segments, added a panel of two practising clinicians for the industry view, and validated the prototype across twelve tasks. The client flagged the recruitment risk before kickoff, and they were right: the usual playbook of fast, high-volume usability recruitment isn't available when the subject is anxiety and depression.  For clinician and staff tools, sessions are built around real conditions rather than a quiet room: interruption, time pressure, and the shortcut people already use.

Look for a partner that has shipped healthcare products, not one that has designed screens for them.  Five questions worth asking before you sign:  Show me a healthcare product you designed and shipped, and how it performed after launch. Portfolios are easy. Post-launch is not. How do you treat HIPAA and security? If the answer is a compliance review near the end, the architecture is already wrong. What's your real FHIR and EHR integration experience? Ask about a specific integration and what went wrong in it. Who writes the code? A design agency subcontracting to an offshore dev shop puts the handoff risk on you. What metric will we measure, and when? An agency unwilling to name one before starting is unlikely to be measured against one afterward.

Results depend on the product, and the ones we can document are specific. On Ellipsis Health, all four testers completed the voice recording the product depends on, with 93% of task attempts completed across eleven measured tasks. CompleteOR went from nothing to two shipped products piloted at Cedars-Sinai and Keck Medicine of USC. MedTrainer saw 23% more inbound leads in the first month after relaunch.  We agree on your outcome metric at kickoff, whether that's engagement, 90-day retention, task completion, or a clinical measure. Then we back it: if the product doesn't improve on that metric within your first year post-launch, we keep working at no additional cost until it does.