In many cases, this happens in medtech because the right kind of design thinking never happened. It’s the sort of thinking that determines whether a clinician picks up your device a second time or whether a staff member can set it up without help, or whether a patient actually wants to wear it.
As co-founder and CEO of FastWave Medical and host of Medsider, where I’ve interviewed more than 250 medtech founders and CEOs, I’ve seen this pattern up close. The companies that get adoption right design for the people in the room, the workflow around the room, and the economics of whoever is paying for the room.
Below are five operators who built that design thinking into their medtech products from day one.
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 chair time,” she says.
That single design decision changed who could offer the therapy. Over 70% of accounts using Amma today had never offered scalp cooling before, and demand is set to rise amid positive reimbursement developments.
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. In most healthcare settings, that’s time.
Your medtech design thinking should consider everyone the device touches
Young Juhn is the CEO of Wellysis, a Samsung spin-off building an at-home ECG monitor. Their S-Patch weighs 8 grams (about two sheets of paper) and is reusable, whereas most competitors are single-use.
Juhn’s team completed hundreds of patient interviews before settling on the form factor. The complaint they kept hearing about existing solutions revolved around skin irritation and bulk, and the fact that wearing one in public made patients self-conscious.
The challenge wasn’t comfort alone; it was also preserving Holter-level signal quality while making something patients would actually wear for 14 days.
So Wellysis designed the device to look more like a Holter line and less like a medical sticker, and made it reusable so patients could eventually own one and run multiple tests a year.
But here’s where Juhn’s approach gets even better. Patient-friendly design only takes you so far. “When you start commercializing, there’s more than the patient. You need to work with doctors, payers, and the health system, Juhn emphasizes.”
That meant integrating with Epic, Cerner, and multiple other systems in the U.S., navigating commercial payer guidelines, and ensuring the patch was compatible with the same low-cost electrodes that hospitals already stock. The device itself can be slick. If the consumables jack up the cost or the data doesn’t flow into the EHR, adoption stalls.
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. Small issues, until they stop the device from working as intended.
The lesson: there are at least four customers for any device. Patient, clinician, health system, payer. Design for one and you’ll get pilots. Design for all four and you’ll get sticky adoption.
Optionality expands the market
Shreya Mehta is the CEO of Zenflow, building a flexible, removable implant for benign prostatic hyperplasia (BPH). The market has existing therapies, but Zenflow’s design choice was to make the implant fully reversible.
That’s a difficult engineering problem. Mehta started as the company’s CTO and was challenged early on to adopt a simpler solution, but she stayed committed to the better 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 where patients are more willing to opt in when they have an easy way out.
The commercial implication is significant. By making the procedure feel more like starting a drug (try it, stop if it doesn’t work), Zenflow is opening BPH to patients who would have waited or never opted in. That moves the device from a late-stage therapy toward a first-line option, which expands the addressable market.
The lesson: design choices that provide optionality (in Zenflow’s case, reversibility) and lower the patient’s perceived risk can reframe your 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, and perhaps eventually in retail pharmacies.
The clinical case is straightforward. Around 80-90% of patients with diabetes see a primary care physician each year. Fewer than half see an ophthalmologist. Pushing screening upstream is where the volume is.
Demas borrows her design philosophy openly from consumer products. Halfway through live product demos, she hands over the iPad controlling the system and asks someone else to run the exam. If they can, that’s the bar for whether the product can live outside a specialist’s office.
The harder discipline, in her view, is what to leave out. Demas separates “desirements” from an MVP. Things that would be nice to have versus things that need to be there to ship. Her benchmark: A product has to be reliable and easy to use.
Two practices stand out with Demas’s 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 treat scope constraints as a moat.
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 one I think about constantly: the techs, nurses, and staff are as much gatekeepers as the doctor.
“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 great clinical product dies. In the 15 minutes between scheduled and ready.
Usen’s response at Adagio is what they call a product design optimization plan, which prioritizes usability alongside the proposed clinical work. The bet is simple. Clinical data gets you the consideration. Usability gets you the second case. The second case is what compounds.
He brought up an analogy that stuck with me. You can dial a phone number digit by digit, or you can press 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 is 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 a patient’s trust. Optionality that expands the patient pool. Discipline that ships on time. Usability that survives staff turnover in the cath lab.
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.
The opinions expressed in this blog post are the author’s only and do not necessarily reflect those of MassDevice or its employees.
