Design Thinking in Medtech: How to Build for Adoption and Stickiness
Clinical performance gets your foot in the door, but thoughtful design is what drives adoption. Products gain traction when they're designed around the clinical, operational, and economic realities of everyone involved in delivering care.
Design around real-world workflows: A better device isn't enough if it slows down care delivery. Build around how providers actually work, while protecting the operational and financial realities of your customers.
Consider every stakeholder: Patients aren't your only users. Consider the needs of clinicians, nurses, health systems, and payers to remove friction at every stage of adoption.
Use design to change behavior: The strongest product decisions don't just improve functionality — they influence how customers think about adopting a therapy, making entirely new patient populations accessible.
Stay disciplined on what matters: Resist the temptation to build every requested feature. Define success early, launch a product that's reliable and intuitive, then improve it through real-world feedback.
Make adoption effortless: Every interaction with your product shapes whether it gets used again. Design for the moments when your team isn't in the room, making setup, training, and everyday use as intuitive as possible.
Design for the Workflow Your Customer Actually Has
Kate Dilligan is the founder and CEO of Cooler Heads, the company behind Amma, a portable scalp-cooling system that reduces hair loss during chemotherapy.
Most scalp-cooling systems require the patient to stay in the infusion chair for two to three hours of post-chemo cooling. For an infusion center, that's a financial problem. Chair time is the asset. Centers are built around a certain number of patients per day and doubling chair time per patient impacts revenue.
Dilligan built a smaller, portable machine that solves this core issue. "By making this such a light touch on the infusion center team, we’re not taking up [additional] chair time," she says.
That single design decision changed who could offer the therapy. Over 70% of the accounts using Amma today had never offered scalp cooling before. Medicare’s January 2026 transition of FDA-cleared, machine-based scalp cooling systems from temporary Category III codes to permanent Category I CPT codes creates a stronger foundation for growth, and centers offering Amma are well-positioned to capture that momentum.
The lesson: If your product slows down workflow, providers will find a reason to pass on it. Design for what your customer is actually optimizing for.
Consider Everyone the Device Touches
Young Juhn is the CEO of Wellysis, a Samsung spin-off building an at-home ECG monitor. Its S-Patch weighs eight grams and is reusable, whereas most competing devices are single-use.
Before settling on the form factor, Juhn’s team completed hundreds of patient interviews. The complaints they kept hearing: existing solutions cause skin irritation, felt bulky, and made patients self-conscious when worn in public.
The challenge wasn’t comfort alone; it was also preserving the standard Holter-level signal quality while making something patients would actually wear for 14 days.
So Wellysis designed the S-Patch to look more like a Holter line and less like a disposable medical sticker. The team also made it reusable so patients could eventually own the device and run multiple tests per year.
But here’s where Juhn’s approach gets even better. Patient-friendly design only takes you so far — when commercialization starts, you also have to design around doctors, payers, and the health system, he notes.
That meant integrating with Epic, Cerner, and multiple other U.S. systems, navigating commercial payer guidelines, and ensuring the patch was compatible with the same low-cost electrodes that hospitals already stock. The device can be elegant, but if it raises consumable costs or creates EHR friction, hospitals have little reason to adopt it.
Wellysis even redesigned the device after rolling out internationally. The original length didn’t fit a broader Western patient population. The power button disappeared under larger thumbs. These sound like small issues until they stop the device from working as intended.
The lesson: every device has more than one customer. Patient, clinician, health systems, and payers all shape adoption. Design for all four and you’ll have a better chance at sticky adoption.
Optionality Expands the Market
Shreya Mehta is the CEO of Zenflow, which is building a flexible, removable implant for benign prostatic hyperplasia (BPH). The market has existing therapies, but Zenflow made a deliberate design choice: its implant would be fully reversible.
That’s a difficult engineering problem. Mehta, who started as the company's CTO, was pushed early on to adopt a simpler solution, but she stayed committed to patient-focused design. "The patient friendliness of this approach is what’s going to drive the market and adoption," she says.
Reversibility matters immensely because BPH treatment is a private, deeply personal decision. For many patients, the ability to try a therapy without feeling locked into it can lower the barrier to saying yes.
The commercial implication is significant. By making the procedure feel more like starting a drug (try it, stop if it doesn’t work), Zenflow could reach patients who might have waited or never opted in. That moves the device from a late-stage therapy toward a first-line option, which expands the potential market.
The lesson: design choices that provide optionality can do more to improve usability. In Zenflow’s case, reversibility lowers the patient’s perceived risk and helps reframe the entire category.
Discipline on Scope is What Gets You to Launch
Vicky Demas is the CEO of identifeye HEALTH, a startup developing an AI-powered retinal imaging system designed to live outside the ophthalmologist’s office, with the goal of moving into retail pharmacies.
The clinical case is straightforward: between 80% and 90% of patients with diabetes see a primary care physician each year, while fewer than half see an ophthalmologist. If you want to increase screening volume, you have to move it upstream.
Demas borrows her design philosophy openly from consumer products. During live product demos, she hands over the iPad controlling the system and asks someone else to run the exam. If they can do it with minimal guidance, that’s a sign for whether the product can work outside a specialist’s office.
The harder discipline, in her view, is what to leave out. Demas separates "desirements" from an MVP: features that would be nice to have versus what must be included to ship. Her benchmark: the product has to be reliable and easy to use.
Two practices stand out with Demas’ approach. First, set acceptance criteria for each phase in advance, before you’re tempted to negotiate them down. Second, get a prototype in front of real users as soon as it’s safe, then iterate based on how they actually use it.
The lesson: every stakeholder will ask you for one more feature. The companies that deliver efficiently are the ones that honor scope constraints.
The Entire Room is the Real Customer
Todd Usen is the CEO of Adagio Medical, a startup working on cryoablation technology for cardiac arrhythmias. Adagio has commercial products in Europe and is pushing toward PMA in the U.S.
Usen runs a lot of his playbook through a marketing lens, and his point about adoption is important: techs, nurses, and staff can influence whether a device gets used just as much as the physician. As he explains: "If a physician walks into the case expecting to use my product, but the staff thinks it’s difficult to set up, all of a sudden they say, ‘Oh, we don’t have that right now. If you want to wait 15 minutes, we’ll go set it up.’ The doctor says, ‘No, just use what you have, we’ll get it next time.’"
That’s how a strong clinical product loses momentum: in the gap between being scheduled and being ready.
Usen’s response at Adagio is what the team calls a product design optimization plan, which prioritizes usability alongside the clinical work. The logic is: clinical data gets you the consideration, but usability gets you the second case. The second case is where adoption starts to compound.
Usen has an analogy for this. You can dial a phone number digit by digit, or you can tap a name on your smartphone. Same outcome, very different experiences. A lot of medical technology is still designed at the digit-by-digit level. Usen’s point is that getting the same clinical result isn’t the bar. The experience has to feel easy, intuitive, and worth choosing.
The lesson: design for the case where your field team is not in the room. If a nurse or tech can’t set it up cold, your device’s shelf life may be short.
Bottom Line: The Best Design Thinking Leads to Sticky Commercial Adoption
The five CEOs above consider device design in the context of commercialization: workflow that protects the customer’s economics, form factor that earns patient trust, optionality that expands the patient pool, discipline that helps teams ship on time, And usability that survives staff turnover.
Adoption happens when your product is the easy choice for everyone in the chain. Stickiness happens when removing it would feel like a step backward.
If your team is still treating design as a "later" problem, you’re probably already losing the next case.