Episode highlights
00:01:50 – Unique aspects of user research in healthcare
00:05:33 – Example of complexity of user research in healthcare
00:12:33 – Motivation for work in healthcare
00:16:27 – The biggest problems in healthcare
00:12:16 – Care plans in healthcare
00:23:21 – A clinitial’s mindset and subconscious bias
00:28:23 – Communicating user research findings in healthcare
00:30:48 - Final advice
About our guest
Dr. Gyles Morrison is a Clinical UX Strategist with 15 years of healthcare experience (as of 2026). Originally a doctor in the UK, he now works globally, aiding UX professionals and healthcare firms in crafting valuable products and services for clinicians and patients. His expertise spans digital therapeutics, healthcare behavior change, health equality, and UX strategy. Gyles also leads the Clinical UX Association, a worldwide community passionate about healthcare. As a UX mentor and career coach, he assists doctors transitioning from clinical practice to UX careers and delivers talks and workshops on career change, personal development, and personal branding. You can connect with him through his website or on LinkedIn.
I think the common denominator for problems in the world, let alone in, in healthcare, is communication or the lack thereof. 
Podcast summary
In this episode of UXR Geeks, Tina Ličková talks with Dr. Gyles Morrison, Clinical UX Strategist and founder of the Clinical UX discipline, about how UX research can reduce bias and improve decision-making in healthcare.
Dr. Morrison discusses how healthcare user research is different from other fields, as UX researchers must consider not only patients’ and clinicians’ behaviors and feelings, but also complex clinical workflows, legal regulations, cultural factors, and the realities of healthcare systems.
He explains why UX researchers should never rely too much on prior experience in healthcare, as clinical environments vary significantly between hospitals, departments, and even individual practitioners.
Dr. Morrison highlights the need for understanding the bigger picture to correctly interpret users’ behaviors when it comes to healthcare. He explains how secondary research combined with in-depth qualitative interviews revealed unapparent barriers for a diabetes coaching project and helped deal with long-term adoption of the app.
The conversation also examines how institutional bias affects patient care, using sickle cell disease to illustrate how racial stereotypes, inaccessible care plans, and inefficient clinical workflows can delay life-saving treatment.
Dr. Morrison argues that UX researchers should design with discrimination in mind by identifying where bias enters clinical processes and creating products that guide evidence-based decisions, reinforce existing clinical guidelines, and make the right actions easier for healthcare professionals to take.
What this means for UX teams
For UX researchers in healthcare
Healthcare research should extend beyond interviews and usability testing. Combine qualitative research with population health data, workflow analysis, and an understanding of clinical practice to uncover barriers that users themselves may never articulate.
For UX designers in healthcare
Design with discrimination in mind. Instead of assuming every clinician will make the right decision, identify where bias or cognitive shortcuts can enter the workflow and create interfaces that reinforce evidence-based care and surface critical information at the right moment.
For product managers building digital health products
High adoption depends on fitting products into patients’ real lives, not idealized user journeys. Research should validate assumptions about literacy, technology access, cultural norms, and existing clinical workflows before features and engagement strategies are defined.
For clinical informatics and health IT teams
Accurate clinical information has little value if clinicians cannot find it when they need it. Review how care plans, guidelines, and patient records are integrated into existing workflows, ensuring critical information is surfaced where decisions are actually made.
For healthcare leaders and digital transformation teams
Reducing bias requires systemic change rather than awareness alone. Support continuous user research, involve stakeholders early, measure outcomes after launch, and align digital products with clinical policies and organizational processes so better care becomes the easiest path to follow.
Podcast transcript
[00:00:00] Dr Gyles Morrison: There’s always a need to do research and not just like, “Oh, my prior experience tells me this is gonna be a problem.” Like, it doesn’t mean your instincts aren’t useful, but you can never stop doing research
[00:00:21] Tina Ličková: Welcome to UXR Geeks, where we geek out with researchers from all around the world on topics they are passionate about. I’m your host, Tina Lickova, a researcher and a product manager, and this podcast is brought to you by UXtweak, the UX research platform for recruiting, conducting, analyzing, and sharing insights all in one place.
This is UXR Geeks, and you are listening to an episode with Gyles, who is appearing on the podcast a second time. And it was my wish to meet him, amongst others, in my last recordings. I’m happy he came and he spoke about a very important topic, which is the bias and the stereotyping in healthcare, and how we actually help as researchers to solve it.
Tune in. Gyles, welcome back!
[00:01:19] Dr Gyles Morrison: Hello. Thank you for having me.
[00:01:21] Tina Ličková: How are you? How have you been?
[00:01:22] Dr Gyles Morrison: I’ve been good. It’s been a while since we last had a conversation. A lot has happened. Busy with parenthood, busy with, with various projects and clients around the world. But yeah, I’m in a good place. I’m in a good place.
[00:01:35] Tina Ličková: Nice.
So we teamed up again to talk about healthcare, UX and healthcare, the research in healthcare, and you are bringing up again a very interesting topic. So I’ll leave it up to you to explicate on it, and then I will maybe interrupt you with some small questions.
[00:01:51] Dr Gyles Morrison: Sure. So yeah, I think what would be great to cover this time, just building on our wonderful previous conversation, is really more about a lot of the challenges that I’ve observed and personally faced when working as a clinical UX professional, and specifically doing user research in healthcare.
I think there is a common sense aspect to it from the general public, and further a common sense aspect from other UX researchers on why is healthcare gonna be more difficult. But it’s when you actually do the work, you work on these projects, you realize it’s even more complicated than you could probably imagine.
So then our common sense aspect is, well, obviously we’re dealing with busy clinicians, we’re dealing with people who are stressed, people who are sick, people who might even be unconscious, so you can’t even communicate with them, and obviously healthcare is a global issue. Everybody deserves to be healthy.
So there’s complexity that people can just appreciate off your top of your head. And then as a UX researcher, you know that actually it’s useful to not just speak to one or two people. You might wanna speak to dozens of people, even hundreds of people sometimes, depending on the context. So access is gonna be a problem.
But it gets even more complicated than that. I think what non-clinicians who get into digital health fail to fully appreciate until they start working on the projects is how much knowledge they need to know about healthcare to really understand everything. So again, there’s a common sense aspect. If you’ve not been to medical school, then you’ve not been a nurse, you’ve not been a pharmacist, there’s loads of stuff they talk about that you don’t know about.
But even when you have trained as a clinician, your first day at work, everything is confusing, everything is new because there isn’t really, apart from a few rare exceptions, there isn’t really one way of doing things in healthcare. You’re gonna see variations within different hospitals, within a hospital, even within a department and within a specialty.
If you get two heart surgeons working in the same hospital who might still do the same heart surgery ever so slightly differently, it’s this sort of variation and almost randomness which is part of the reason why things are quite complicated. There’s always a need to do research and not just like, “Oh, my prior experience tells me this is gonna be a problem.”
Like, it doesn’t mean your instincts aren’t useful But you can never stop doing research. There’s always something new to come, some new way of working, just something random that just happens that catches you off guard. It’s extremely, extremely common in healthcare. Okay. The next thing that is particularly challenging is the regulatory side of things.
So again, we all know that privacy, security of data, patient data, clinical data, we’re gonna keep it safe. But what does that mean as a researcher, how you can access the data, actually do your analysis with it, to share that data with others and bring changes? And what that looks like in Europe is a little bit different to what it looks like in America, and it’s a bit different to what it looks like in different other countries around the world.
There’s always something new to learn, and so I think it’s what makes it fun, but it can also make it very daunting and overwhelming when you get into digital health as a UX researcher, for sure.
[00:05:19] Tina Ličková: Do you maybe have an example? Because I can imagine, I mean, the complexity of healthcare, what is maybe an example of you not understanding before the research, the system well enough that it even surprises you?
[00:05:33] Dr Gyles Morrison: Mm-hmm. So I’ll use a really great example from some years back. I was working for a big pharmaceutical company, and they worked on a project called MediCoach. This is a telehealth coaching, so remote health coaching service for patients living with Type 2 diabetes living in Mexico. Now, the service is free, and it’s clearly of benefit to people.
It’s gonna help them understand more about their Type 2 diabetes, what they can do about their diet and nutrition and exercise, and keep them healthier. Now, despite it being free and there being unanimous praise for the service from patients, it was only about 20% of patients who registered for their first health coaching session actually completed all five sessions about five to eight months later.
Just about 20%. Mm-hmm.
[00:06:28] Tina Ličková: Okay.
[00:06:28] Dr Gyles Morrison: They even got a glucose meter and some other little bits and pieces to incentivize them to use this free service. And there was so much talk from colleagues, whether it’s in the main office in the pharmaceutical company or some of the health coaches about, you know, what we could be doing to make the service better, and there wasn’t that step backwards to look at everything holistically and be like, “Well, isn’t it a bit of a red flag that everyone says that this service is perfect?”
Nothing in this world is perfect. Nothing. Yeah. You can’t assume that 100% of patients had nothing bad to say. And partly that was a cultural consequence or an initial sort of findings that was done internally, is that culturally the people in Mexico, they don’t want to offend the clinicians, especially when someone’s gone out of their way to give them something for free.
So back to your question, though, is like an example of why would it be so complicated is where was the true understanding of the lived experience of these patients? Now, researchers would appreciate that such research needs to be done. You know, I can understand that other researchers would know that, ’cause when I worked on that project- I had a friend of mine who is based in Chile help to do that research in Mexico.
Instantly we knew we had to do a lot of research with patients, but I think what wasn’t also appreciated is even if you do research with the patients, you might still confine yourself to what I like to call participant-dependent research. So you’re interviewing people, you might even be observing them, and you get a lot of insights from that.
But there is a huge wealth of data that you can learn about population health as well, and I think that was not being considered from the get-go, and I pushed to do that, and it was quite worrying, the data. It was highlighting that on average, particularly amongst the patients that we were dealing with who were using a free service, it’s normal for them to have very low numeracy literacy skills.
It’s quite normal for them to not be able to afford a contract that allows them to make many calls out. They can receive calls, and they can even use Facebook and WhatsApp for free because of the data plan that they have, but they wouldn’t have, like, a gigabyte of data. Like I take for granted in Europe, I think my contract is about 25 gigabytes or 40 gigabytes.
In some parts of the world, they’re lucky to have one gigabyte a month to use To put into perspective, one Uber journey can use about 30 megabytes of data. So you can see how the data can go really, really quickly. Highlight this to say that you have to really try and understand every aspect of the average patient’s life, but also, and it’s the case also for clinicians, the average clinician’s life, but also those who are gonna be the most trusting, the most willing, the most engaged, the most switched on, ’cause they’re like these super users, so to speak, or early adopters.
But in the other extreme, those who are the most hesitant, the most afraid, the most anxious, the most resistant to this new way of working, this, this behavior that you’re trying to understand or change. And when you start thinking from that perspective, like people who are filled with doubt or dread, or those who are just so excited and so keen, guide your research towards those sort of extremes.
It’s much more useful to do that in healthcare. It’s useful probably in every industry, but particularly in healthcare, you get those extreme type of personalities that you’ve gotta try and do research with, and that’s what we did with that project. And that allowed us to understand that actually make this solution much simpler.
Still do your telehealth coaching service, but send information between the coaching sessions via WhatsApp, which is free, and use infographics because images communicate information much quicker than words do. And that then scaled from anywhere from about 4 or 500 patients per year to now that about three, four years has passed, and just in Mexico, it spread across all the other countries in Latin America, and there’s probably about 20 odd thousand patients that have now gone through the service.
So we simplified it, you know, simplifying was important.
[00:10:49] Tina Ličková: You simplified it based on pretty complex research because if I try to summarize, it’s the qualitative research speaking to the users, it’s the macro-economical and cultural insights, so the secondary research comes very handy. Mm-hmm. But I have to admit, what I most love about it is the critical p- starting point, like nothing is perfect.
Yeah. I’m just not believing, oh, this is a great product because everybody’s saying so, and being suspicious to that. Yeah. Which is, it’s also a very important thing.
[00:11:21] Dr Gyles Morrison: We’ll be right back after a short break with a commercial message from our sponsors.
[00:11:29] Tina Ličková: Hey, UXR Geeks. You know this podcast is brought to you by UXtweak.🐝
I’ve tried several UX research tools before, and most either make recruitment a nightmare or overcomplicate the analysis. UXtweak is the first one that actually does both well. I can recruit participants from over 130 countries with solid quality checks and detailed profiling, and it supports both moderated and unmoderated studies, and analyzing results doesn’t feel overwhelming.
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From what I know with discussions with you, you are strongly motivated by your own life. So what is the case on your side, and why do you make sure that you do great work in healthcare?
[00:12:33] Dr Gyles Morrison: Yeah, this is… It’s a good question. So there’s a few motivations. The first one is tied to my identity as a doctor, I suppose, and I suppose also as a Christian, like how am I able to help other people have better lives?
When you train as a doctor, as cliche as it sounds, really you’re doing it because you want to make other people happier and healthier. That is the general motivation. Some people also talk about fame and fortune and things, but really it’s about how you’re gonna help someone else. But I think what is particularly important is the fact that my wife also lives with sickle cell anemia.
I’ll explain that a bit more, but with her living with sickle cell anemia, she’s, she’s my life partner, of course I’m gonna see how I can put my skills and training to good use to improve her health So sickle anaemia is a variant of sickle cell disease, which is a hereditary disease of red blood cells.
It means that when the red blood cells give off oxygen, if you remember from school days, the blood goes away from the heart and goes to your cells, gives off oxygen, comes away, takes the toxins in the blood away, and then goes back to the lungs to pick up the oxygen. So when red blood cells, for someone who’s got sickle cell, gives off the oxygen, they go into what’s known as a sickle shape.
Sickle looks like a crescent moon sort of shape. Mm-hmm. And with a crescent moon, it’s got, like, pointy ends to it. Now, if you have loads of the red cells that become sickled, they can bunch up, a bit like having a clot, but they bunch up and get stuck in very, very tiny blood vessels, the smallest blood vessels that would serve, like, your joints and your muscles.
And the trigger for that, other than giving off oxygen, would be stress, maybe infection, and particularly for my wife, it’s cold weather or extreme temperature changes. So if she’s somewhere very, very hot, and that goes to, like, a average room temperature, that can also be a trigger for a pain crisis.
[00:14:34] Tina Ličková: Oh, okay.
[00:14:35] Dr Gyles Morrison: Mm-hmm. Yeah. And it’s quite serious having a sickle pain crisis. So this is an episode when you have a lot of those sickle cells getting stuck in joints, in muscles, in the blood vessels, tiny blood vessels, and it’s considered a medical emergency because if that continues without getting any better, it can lead to end organ damage because you’re stopping the blood flowing properly.
And it’s really excruciating pain when it happens as well because you’ve got part of the body slowly dying. So it’s very simple treatment actually when someone has a pain crisis. You give them intravenous fluids, you give them very strong pain relief, morphine, not just paracetamol or ibuprofen. It won’t do anything.
Mm-hmm. And then bed rest And if you do that very, very quickly, say, like within an hour or so of the symptoms starting, that person will probably have a full recovery within a day even. Can be really, really rapid. So when my wife- Yeah … has a pain crisis at home, we don’t have, you know, all the equipment to do intravenous fluids, but she will drink a lot of water.
She will take some strong paracetamol and ibuprofen at home, do deep tissue massage to try and move the blood around the body a bit better, and she can recover later that day. A few episodes she’s had to be hospitalized with it over the years, and that’s where you see suffering big time. And what’s quite sad about that suffering is that it’s very, very avoidable and extremely prevalent, though, amongst patients living with sickle cell.
[00:16:10] Tina Ličková: Mm-hmm. It’s hard to even process this, not to even go through it, and I’m wondering, we all have experiences from the health system, either from, from our life or from lives of our loved ones, as you have. Where do you see the biggest problems happening?
[00:16:27] Dr Gyles Morrison: I think the common denominator for problems in the world, let alone in, in here, is communication or the lack thereof.
So with the case of someone with sickle cell, it will be that the patient almost always knows exactly what they need. They know they need IV fluids. They know they need morphine. They’re asking for it, but it’s not normal to go to the emergency department and ask for morphine, especially if you don’t look like you’ve had a gunshot wound, you don’t have a knife in your back, you haven’t just come from a massive road traffic accident, and your legs are broken or something.
Why are you asking for morphine? When you see the patient, you feel like they’re not that unwell. There’s a bias that a lot of clinicians can have to even assume that Black people, and most people with sickle cell are of African Caribbean descent, and there’s a perception that we have a higher threshold for pain.
We don’t. We absolutely do not. It’s a total, total myth But because of that perception that, okay, we’ll start you on paracetamol, ibuprofen, or if they are gonna give morphine, they’ll give a very small dose which doesn’t do anything. And it’s these sorts of things that is part of the problem, is that the patient knows what they need.
It’s not the first time they’ve had this issue. They actually see specialist hematologists about their disease, and they should have a care plan that stipulates exactly what needs to be done when they have one of these sickle pain crisis and go to the hospital. And so when they’re not being listened to, it’s extremely offensive on a few grounds.
One is just the simple aspect of, well, the patient is making a respectable request, which is tied to best practice in treating the patient. Why are you ignoring them? The next part is that you’re assuming that they’re lying to you, or you’re assuming that they are being overzealous with their request, so therefore you’re gonna ignore the request and do what you think is best.
Again, it’s insulting ’cause you’re dismissing what they are actually saying. But it’s also the fact that the nature of working in a busy hospital, when a doctor or whoever else has rights to prescribe the morphine writes the prescription, it doesn’t mean the patient gets the morphine straight away. It doesn’t even mean that they may even get it in the next half an hour, because nine times out of 10, depending on where you are in the world, when morphine is prescribed, it’s classed as a controlled drug, which means you have to have another clinician check Everything that’s being done, and even physically be there when the medication is given to the patient.
So- Mm-hmm … they both look at the prescription independently. They both look at what has been drawn up as liquid morphine to give to the patient. They both have to confirm with the patient their name and date of birth, and look at a wristband to confirm the name and date of birth matches that on the wristband and on the prescription, just to make sure that it’s safe for this patient.
And sometimes the ward doesn’t even have morphine. So- Yeah … the prescription is given at 10:00, right? The patient needs it at 8:00 AM, but the patient still might not get that medication until 11:00 AM, midday. And then when they are given it, they’re given a small dose, 5 milligrams, at 12:00 and are told, “Okay, you have to wait two hours for another dose.”
So the patient’s been in excruciating pain from 8:00 AM, it’s now 12:00, and they still haven’t been given enough pain relief. So at 2:00 o’clock they’re then given 10 milligrams, which still is not enough. They need 20. So it’s then another two hours, it’s now 4:00 o’clock in the afternoon. Now you see why people are not getting any better, because a delay in treatment for an emergency, like a heart attack, stroke, you know, it’s still taking them two hours to get a prescription, but then many, many hours to actually get the dose that they deserve.
It’s not always the case, but the vast majority of the time, that’s what happens.
[00:20:17] Tina Ličková: One thing that I see there is the bias, because- Mm … you see patients are mistreated or even not diagnosed, sent home, you know, because you are hysterical, whatever. The other side is when it comes to my mind, like, why the patient doesn’t have a, you know, a badge or a something.
Yeah, you know, digital system where it’s like, okay, this is where we deliver the morphine as fast as possible because we have proof, we don’t have to debate about it.
[00:20:43] Dr Gyles Morrison: Two main things to explain. One is what’s going on in the mind of the clinician. I’m gonna come back to that. But the second part of, you know, why isn’t there care plans being used?
So very often a patient actually will have a care plan if they’re seen by a specialist doctor. If there’s a specialist that’s involved, very often there will be a set of instructions on what to do when this patient has a serious issue. This is their care plan, and it’s a personalized care plan if it’s written specifically for that patient, or there is gonna be generic care plans which are otherwise gonna be considered guidelines on what to do for that patient.
So generally speaking, we know what we should do for a patient if they have a stroke. So same thing that would be done for, for sickle cell. So there are care plans that are generic for anybody that’s got a general presentation or it’s something that’s been personalized to that patient. But until someone sees the care plan, the care plan is useless, and that’s a big part of research that I did when I did my master’s in human computer interaction.
I was looking at, so surely the hematologists are trying to get information, but what they’ll do is they’ll create a care plan, particularly in the UK, I can’t speak for many other countries, but in the UK, in the NHS, the hematologist will write this care plan. It goes into the patient’s digital record as a letter.
Now, depending on the electronic health record system that’s being used, the letters from like an information architecture perspective, is far removed from where the first doctor or first clinician ever seeing that patient is gonna check out on the digital system. In fact, if that patient has gone to the emergency department, they may never look at the patient’s digital record.
They may only just see what is the information they gave at reception and the triage nurse to say why they came to the emergency department today. So that care plan never gets seen. The other option is the patient does go to the emergency department very often. So even though the emergency staff there have a high turnover and there’s different rotas and shifts going on, they will put that care plan on a wall in the doctor’s office and everybody just says, “When this patient comes in, there’s their care plan on the wall.”
But sometimes it’s not there because someone’s moved it, someone has damaged it, and it hasn’t been replaced, or someone hasn’t known that there’s a care plan available. So again, the care plan can be created, but if it’s never seen, it’s useless So there’s efforts being made, but quite frankly, they’re not good enough.
‘Cause again, you’ve written this document, but if you’ve not presented it in such a way to make sure that the clinicians who need to read it actually read it, it’s useless. Back to the clinicians then. What’s going on in the mindset of the clinician? Some of it I can understand as a doctor myself, and some of it I’ve had to learn as a patient and by doing research here, and it really boils down to the thinking that’s done.
There’s subconscious knowledge that we have, and then there’s conscious actual thoughts that we have to process information. The subconscious ones, it’s all pretty much rooted in institutionalized discrimination, which means that- There is a thought process and way of working that people in an institution, in a hospital, the healthcare industry in general, there’s a way of working and thinking that everyone just tends to subscribe to.
It doesn’t mean that they deliberately wanna discriminate against people. They’re not deliberately racist or sexist. It’s just that if their teacher was taught by their teacher that Black patients tend to have a bit more tolerance for pain, that, you know, women might be a bit more hysterical when they go to hospital, that drunks may not really have injured their head that much, that, you know, children might be lying.
You know, where there is this belief that keeps on being passed down from one generation to the other, it just becomes the mindset that everybody has. Mm-hmm. They don’t realize that the belief that they have is based on a lie or at least based on an exaggeration. The next problem is the conscious part, where there’s arrogance and ignorance, which is a very dangerous combination when it also coexists with fear.
So you’ve got a clinician who has regularly throughout their lifetime, not just at medical school, maybe even before, been told, “You’re very intelligent. You’re very capable. You, you always do such great work.” So there’s an assumption that when they see this sickle cell patient that they’ve never treated before, that they’ll be able to do a great job, but they don’t really know what they’re doing, ’cause they did learn some stuff at medical school, but they haven’t got the experience of dealing with the patient.
So there’s arrogance and ignorance, but there’s a fear of being seen as a doctor who can’t do a good job. Who wants to go to a doctor that doesn’t know the disease that they’re treating? Who wants to go to a doctor who doesn’t trust their ability in treating the patient? So there’s a fear that a lot of clinicians can have, and I’ve definitely experienced it, that you don’t want to be seen as someone who can’t get the job done, so you lie, so you avoid, and you only focus on what you know and what you’re good at, which then leads to patients getting a small dose of morphine ’cause the clinician’s not used to giving a high dose unless there’s a clear indication, as far as they’re concerned, to do so.
They don’t fully trust the patient, so it’s like, “Well, maybe you’re lying because I’ve been told that patients like you lie.” So there’s a thinking that happens that’s dangerous. Now, thinking in healthcare, you’d be surprised how dangerous that is paradoxically because generally speaking, as clinicians, we are taught to investigate and look for patterns.
‘Cause when you found particular set of signs and symptoms, signs being what we see as clinicians of disease and symptoms being what the patient reports of their disease, we look for that combination of signs and symptoms to say, “That’s a heart attack. That’s a stroke. That’s pneumonia. That’s a sickle pain crisis” And then when you’ve got a diagnosis, it always links back to a treatment or at least saying this is terminal.
There’s some, you know, support treatment that we can offer. But a diagnosis always links to treatment. And so a lot of medicine is pattern recognition, not a lot of thinking. The thinking is, have I got enough evidence to accept this diagnosis? That’s what normally the thinking is. But the next level of thinking that happens that’s destructive is, does this patient deserve my time?
Does this patient really deserve treatment? Is this patient actually gonna get better if I help them or not? And that sort of thinking becomes very, very dangerous because a lot of people are not worthy of making those decisions and don’t have the information to make the best decision to answer those questions.
[00:27:38] Tina Ličková: And I feel like, you know, there’s a lot of debates between citizens, patients, I mean, I’m talking almost nonstop about it with my friends which have parents getting older, and we see this arrogance, ignorance, and we see also that the system is not well-built, so the, the physicians are struggling in the system as well.
They are, like, overwhelmed by it.
[00:28:03] Dr Gyles Morrison: Yes.
[00:28:04] Tina Ličková: So when thinking about your research, and what I loved you said, it’s not just, you know, pointing out the problems, but looking into the solutions.
[00:28:11] Dr Gyles Morrison: Mm-hmm.
[00:28:11] Tina Ličková: And you can explicate on it as much as you want and then go into different fields, but I’m especially interested if you ever had a chance and how it went to present the research to the physician.
[00:28:24] Dr Gyles Morrison: Yeah, that’s a good question. So what’s interesting is that even amongst there being a lot of clinicians that are very arrogant and ignorant and unwilling to change, there’s still a desire to do what’s best for patients if the evidence backs it up. So at the end of the day, clinicians are still scientists really.
Mm-hmm. So if you provide evidence, most of the time, the vast majority of the time, the evidence will then guide them towards a new way of working because that is the basic concept in modern medicine is to deliver evidence-based care. There must be evidence that backs up what we’re actually doing to treat a disease, how we’re diagnosing it, and how we’re then treating it.
So I think it’s also then presenting the information similar to in other industries and other scenarios in a way that doesn’t make the clinician feel bad for doing something wrong because that’s a, an easy way to lose people and alienate people, and you’re not winning hearts. So you’re trying to blame them even though they are to blame, but if this is how they’ve been taught and they’re in an environment where this is the mindset, it’s not one person to blame.
It’s the system to blame actually.
[00:29:36] Tina Ličková: Mm-hmm.
[00:29:37] Dr Gyles Morrison: You should already feel motivated to be presented in a way that is like, “We as an industry can be doing better. This is what we see doesn’t work, and this is what we see is a way of making things better, and this is the actual steps that you can take to make things better.”
So again, it’s not just presenting the problem. It’s highlighting, well, what’s the solution and why you should trust the solution. And generally speaking, which is different to other aspects of stakeholder management, there is an aspect of, well, what’s in it for me as a clinician? But what’s in it for me as a clinician is, is my patient healthier after my intervention?
That’s what they care about most. And so if, if you’re presenting your findings, that’s gonna help them do their job better, clinicians tend to be very receptive to these findings, even if it shows that they’ve been doing a terrible job beforehand.
[00:30:28] Tina Ličková: Okay. So there is this kind of self-reflection if brought up nicely, I would summarize, which is a human trait, like doctors are also humans.
[00:30:37] Dr Gyles Morrison: Correct. Correct.
[00:30:37] Tina Ličková: Yeah. Yeah. Is there maybe something that you would like to especially point out from the research that you did on this topic and we didn’t yet mention?
[00:30:48] Dr Gyles Morrison: Yes. I think a way of summarizing what I’ve said, but also being really clear on what this means from a practical perspective when you’re working in digital health, you should design with discrimination in mind.
Like, I cannot stop a clinician being racist, sexist, ageist, homophobic. I can’t stop people having feelings But I can influence their behavior based on the technology that I create and put out into the world, and those, the services that I design and put out into the world. It can influence their behavior.
Can’t guarantee it, but if you recognize that people are gonna have belief systems that can be destructive, it allows you to then have a new design constraint. You shouldn’t see it as it’s impossible now to make things better. As much as I know that the world is not perfect, doesn’t mean I don’t strive for perfection.
Shoot for the stars, you hopefully land on the moon, you know? And what that means in a practical perspective, designing with discrimination in mind, you have to do some sort of meaningful behavior change work. You need to map out the processes we’re already familiar with. You do some research, do some sort of journey mapping, and you maybe do a task analysis, some way of identifying opportunities to bring change, but being clear on where are the problem states, what, what are the root causes, where the steps in this task flow which can lead to discrimination, and seeing, well, what tweak could bypass the discrimination?
So even a racist doctor still has to treat patients and get them better, because if they’re seen to do harm, they’ll be fired, or worse, they’ll be prosecuted. And one of the things that clinicians are very good at, they’ll follow guidelines. If they’re told, “To do your job, you have to follow these guidelines,” they’ll do it.
There’ll be exceptions, just like laws of the land, some people will still ignore laws. That’s why we have criminals, right? Yeah. It’s no different in healthcare. But generally speaking, if it’s like, “This is our policy, this is our guidance, this is how we do things in this hospital, otherwise you don’t have a job,” people follow that.
So that’s what you need to try and do is see how your digital product or service already fits in with existing policies, or how you can change the policy. Changing policies and ways of working can be very, very difficult. You normally need the C-suite to get involved to some extent. Otherwise, it’s seeing, well, how does this fit in with the general way of doing things at a high level?
And that should normally lead to a change that can be easily adopted. And there’s the other, you know, common aspects of what we do. Your stakeholder engagement needs to be early. Your research needs to be throughout the process, regularly getting opportunities to get feedback and then bring changes, and it needs to be launch evaluations and continuous improvement going on.
So there has to be regular engagement with the end user, and you have to have champions, you have to have key performance metrics so you can measure that success to see if there is improvement or not, and again, make a change. But definitely understanding how what you’re doing can still be successful despite there being people who might have less than positive intentions and ways of working.
[00:34:07] Tina Ličková: Gyles, thank you. This is what I told you my last recording, so I thank you for making it such a great one.
[00:34:14] Dr Gyles Morrison: And thank you for having me. It’s always a pleasure speaking with you and, and being part of this podcast.
[00:34:22] Tina Ličková: Thank you for listening to UXR Geeks. If you enjoyed this episode, please follow our podcast and share it with your friends and colleagues. Your support is really what keeps us going.
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And to all of you, thank you for tuning in.
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