Healthcare doesn’t have an innovation problem. It has an adoption problem.

In 2025, we planted our flag in healthcare, an industry we believe has a duty to consider how products and services are used. Since then, we've worked with health systems, digital health companies, biopharma teams, and more. Across very different products and services, we kept getting called to solve a similar challenge:‍

People weren't using what had been built for them.

This may sound like an obvious problem. You build something + no one uses it = bad. But here’s where it gets tricky…

Unlike consumer products, healthcare users rarely wake up looking for your thing. A patient may be enrolled by a health plan. A provider may be required to use a new workflow. The decision to adopt happens far away from the people expected to change their behavior.

These tools are paid for by health plans or hospital systems with the promise of reduced cost.

The tools deliver on that metric…

…if they are adopted and activated.

The problem to be solved becomes: if the tool saves time, improves outcomes, and reduces costs, why isn’t it being used?

Or, for some companies, how do they make sure it’s going to be used before launching and promising the world to the ones who hold the purse strings?

This is the exact question we’ve worked through for clients like Cortica, SonarMD, and a large multinational biopharma company.‍

Why good tools still fail

The heart of the issue is understanding behaviors, workflows, and environments. 

Most products are built around features and ideal workflows — what the product can do, in the conditions where it should work. The problem is that healthcare doesn't happen in ideal conditions.

And, in a world where it’s becoming increasingly cheaper to design, build, and deploy, every pain point has five tools to address it. There are, perhaps, too many choices and new things to learn in a field where time and attention are increasingly demanded. How does your solution stand out?

Other times, tools force people into a workflow that’s incongruous with the way they work, think, or behave.

Sometimes, the tool is too simple.

Sometimes, too complex.

Sometimes, it lacks nuance.

Sometimes, it’s just not urgently needed.

It’s not only about a streamlined onboarding or a more visual landing page. Clients may come to us asking for wireframes, but what they really need is for people to change behavior.

The details vary but our approach is simple: deeply understand your human users because the real barrier is behavioral, and you can't find it by looking at your product. You find it by understanding the people who are supposed to use it — their mental state, their environment, what else is competing for their attention, the twelve other things running through their brain.

We pair this with behavior science principles: limiting recall, giving people flexibility, elevating accessibility, creating psychological safety, delivering just-in-time support, adding or removing friction, and more.

This is a board-level problem too

When adoption doesn't materialize, it's not just a clinical problem. Investors funded the promise of scale. Health system partners signed contracts built on utilization assumptions. And now someone has to walk into a board meeting and explain why the numbers aren't where the model said they'd be.

The companies that get ahead of this — before launch, before renewals, before the next raise — are the ones who treat adoption as a design problem from the start, not a communications problem after the fact.