CARE — Patient History
Designing how a clinician reads a patient's whole story at a glance.
CARE is open-source hospital software used across India. The patient history screen is where a doctor decides what happens next — and it was buried under tabs, tables and clicks. This is how we turned it into a story you can read.
- Role
- Product Designer
- Timeline
- 2024 – 2025
- Team
- Solo design + 2 engineers
- Skills
- Product DesignAccessibilityDesign SystemsResearch
Read this case study as
Overview
A doctor often has ninety seconds with a patient's record before the next person walks in. In those ninety seconds they need the shape of a whole illness — not a spreadsheet.
It ships as an accessible, open-source module inside CARE, used by real hospitals — so every decision had to survive slow devices, small screens and screen readers.
The Problem
Everything lived behind tabs. To reconstruct a patient's timeline, a clinician had to open five screens and hold the story in their head.
The core tension
More completeness made the screen *less* usable. Every field we surfaced added noise; every field we hid risked hiding the one thing that mattered.
Research
I sat with clinicians and watched them read real (anonymised) records, noting the exact order their eyes moved and where they got stuck.
- They scan top-down for a timeline, not left-right through a table.
- Medications and allergies are checked first, almost reflexively.
- Anything requiring a click to reveal is treated as *not there*.
Design Decisions
One vertical timeline
Encounters became a single vertical spine, newest first, with medications and events hanging off it — so the record reads like prose instead of a query result.
A strict type scale
We gave the screen a real hierarchy: a few sizes, used consistently, so importance is legible before you read a single word.
Good design here is invisible — it just means the doctor never has to go looking.
Final Solution
The result is a record you read the way you'd read a story: a clear beginning, the important things surfaced, and detail one calm tap away.
Reflection
The biggest lesson: in healthcare, restraint is a feature. The best thing we added was the courage to hide things.