Designing for Peace of Mind: Reducing Cognitive Load and Building Trust in Digital Healthcare

Written by Aaron Foxwell & Shin N Chan

Healthcare systems in Asia are under tremendous pressure to adapt to digital transformation while meeting the needs of diverse and growing populations. The digital health market is expected to grow by 23.1% from 2024 to 2030, driven by an increasing focus on patient-centric healthcare solutions.  But a digital-first approach comes with unique challenges in designing intuitive experiences.

From telehealth platforms to electronic health records (EHRs), the stakes in healthcare UX design are higher than ever. Poorly designed tools create unnecessary barriers, increasing cognitive load and undermining trust and engagement in moments of critical decision-making. Thoughtful UX directly impacts patient outcomes, provider efficiency and organisational success, making it a critical focus of driving healthcare innovation in Asia.

The mental burden of navigating healthcare

Healthcare interactions often take place under unique and stressful conditions. Patients seek clarity and assurance while grappling with symptoms and decisions about their well-being. Meanwhile, clinicians balance delivering accurate care with managing complex systems and administrative tasks. Poorly designed tools exacerbate this stress, increasing cognitive load - the mental effort required to interact with systems - and leading to patient frustration and provider inefficiencies.

Consider a patient trying to schedule a follow-up appointment after a hospital discharge. If the provided digital platform lacks intuitive navigation, requires re-entering personal details multiple times, or fails to provide clear appointment availability, they may struggle to secure the necessary follow-up care. This leads to missed appointments, delays in treatment, and an overall sense of disengagement from their care journey.

Clinicians face even more complex challenges with fragmented systems. For example, when diagnosing a patient, they may need to review lab results in one system, imaging data in another, and patient histories in a third. These disjointed workflows force clinicians to toggle between systems, increasing cognitive load and reducing time spent with patients. Such inefficiencies contribute to burnout and hinder the adoption of digital tools.

Principles for designing thoughtful digital healthcare experiences

1. Reduce mental effort

For patients: 

Simplify key tasks such as appointment scheduling and insurance verification into easy-to-complete steps. Instead of requiring users to manually fill in repetitive forms at each stage, the system can pre-populate details using stored patient data. Digital capabilities can also minimise back-and-forth communication by displaying real-time data such as available time slots, required documents, and insurance coverage. This approach not only saves patients valuable time but also provides reduces user input errors, empowering users to complete these processes with ease and confidence.

Zocdoc’s easy to use appointment booking with clear timeslots and reduced user input

For clinicians: 

Consolidate patient data, dashboards, and processes into one system. Clinicians often have to juggle multiple touchpoints to access patient information and complete traditional workflows. Valuable time is spent hunting for information and trying to piece together a holistic view of their patient’s health. This fragmented approach increases cognitive load, disrupts the flow of care, and leads to insufficient focus on the patients themselves.

2. Simplify decisions

For patients:

Limit options in key patient tasks to reduce the cognitive load on users and alleviate decision fatigue. Platforms that manage aspects of patient care such as medication should avoid overwhelming information or options upfront. Instead, present a clear, immediate next step – especially for high-stake interactions. Balance between informing patients with critical information without distracting them by other, less pressing details.

For clinicians:

Leverage context-aware suggestions so that systems can intelligently filter and prioritise information based on the specific task at hand. In a healthcare setting, clinicians are often required to make fast, high-stake decisions. Context-aware suggestions can use patient data to provide clinicians with smart recommendations such as the critical symptoms, lab results and medical history that require further attention. Taking it a step further, intelligent systems can suggest next steps such as ordering follow up tests for areas of concern. With the growing capabilities of AI, future clinician tools can help to narrow down options and streamline operational efficiency.

Epic’s machine learning models scan patient data to alert doctors on critical care

3. Provide reassurance

For patients:

In the healthcare journey, ambiguity or lack of communication not only leads to confusion, but also anxiety when patients are trying to navigate treatment. By offering concise, reassuring feedback, healthcare platforms can build trust with their users as they complete tasks. Patients should be informed when they have successfully completed an action (e.g. booking an appointment), understand what to expect next and feel in control. What results is confidence in processes that they might otherwise be unfamiliar with.

For clinicians:

As AI innovation grows within healthcare, intelligent diagnostic tools can play a transformative role in the way clinicians analyse data and make decisions. Yet without trust in these systems, such tools may create clinician scepticism or worse, outright resistance. EHR and any other clinician-facing tools must build trust through transparent systems, in which any decisions or data must be clearly explainable. Why were specific results flagged? How does the data relate to the underlying condition? These are some questions that systems need to answer to provide reassurance for clinicians using them to inform their decisions.

Qure.ai’s medical imaging technology provides reasoning as to why scans are flagged

Why all this matters

Healthcare is a deeply human endeavour, and every interaction—whether patient-facing or clinician-focused—has immense potential to improve lives. Thoughtful UX design plays a pivotal role in shaping these experiences, transforming complex systems into intuitive, seamless journeys that empower users.

In a world where healthcare systems are rapidly evolving, designing with purpose and empathy isn’t just an advantage—it’s a necessity. By prioritising user-centered solutions, we create a future where technology supports, rather than hinders, the mission of delivering exceptional care.

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