How Clinician-Developer Collaboration is Changing User Experience

To provide excellent patient care, clinicians must make a myriad of decisions many of them complex. With this understanding, engineers and designers collaborate closely with clinicians to understand their evolving needs, workflows, and thought processes to ensure that UpToDate® delivers the most valuable user experience. Trained in internal medicine and infectious diseases, Sheila Bond, MD has been caring for highly immunocompromised patients at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and other Harvard-affiliated hospitals for more than ten years. When she’s not at the hospital, Bond focuses her time on UpToDate as the deputy editor for infectious diseases.

Bond has worked in medical publishing for the past eight years, and says clinical decision-making, or decision-making in general, has always been a part of her career. “I studied formal logic as an undergraduate and how different presentations of information influence how you think. Today, on top of my editorial and clinical roles, I teach a course on clinical reasoning at Harvard Medical School.” Mark Munzer, the director of user experience at Wolters Kluwer Health, Clinical Effectiveness, approaches clinical decision-making from the viewpoint of a technologist.