A working mobile prototype that outperformed Epic's EHR on clinical usability — designed for emergency physicians, validated in real ER conditions, and built as a direct challenge to the status quo in health tech UI.
Epic Systems is the dominant electronic health record platform in the United States — used by over 350 million patients' worth of records and the majority of major hospital systems. It is, by most measures, a powerful clinical data engine.
Its mobile UX is not.
Emergency physicians work in one of the highest-stakes, fastest-moving environments in medicine. They need to track 15–30 patients simultaneously, make rapid triage decisions, and communicate status across a team — often while physically moving. Epic's mobile interface was built to surface data, not to support that workflow. The result is a tool that requires too many taps, too much scrolling, and too much cognitive load at the exact moment a physician can afford none.
This was not a hypothetical. A practicing ER physician tested both Epic's mobile experience and this prototype during the same shift. His feedback was direct: the UI was meaningfully easier to use. That's the gap this project addresses.
"Epic makes a much better mobile version since it has all their tools integrated. But this UI is much easier to use."
— Emergency Physician, real-world prototype testThat single sentence contains the entire product opportunity. Epic has the data. Epic does not have the UX. Those are two different problems — and one of them is solvable from the outside.
Emergency physicians have no fast, purpose-built mobile tool for tracking patient flow. Epic's mobile app surfaces clinical data but was not designed for the speed and physicality of an ER shift — physicians are walking, multitasking, and making decisions in seconds, not minutes.
Design and build a working mobile prototype that solves the workflow problem Epic doesn't — fast patient entry, glanceable status, real-time prioritization, and no typing — while staying HIPAA-conscious and completable in a single browser session.
Built a fully functional, self-contained mobile web app with a physician-tested rapid add flow (<2 seconds per patient), a priority triage system using clinical terminology (Critical / Urgent / Stable), real-time timers, a Flow Boost prioritization engine, and an iteration loop with a real ER physician who tested it in practice and gave feedback that shaped every subsequent design decision.
A working prototype validated by a clinical user who explicitly said it outperformed Epic's mobile UX on usability. The physician's primary feedback was that if Epic's interface worked like this, it would meaningfully reduce cognitive load during high-acuity shifts. The prototype now serves as a design vision for what Epic's mobile layer could become — and a concrete pitch asset for that conversation.
Every choice in this interface was made with one question: what does an ER physician need in the 1.5 seconds they can give this screen?
The standalone prototype solves the UX problem. The product opportunity is what happens when this interface sits on top of Epic's data layer.
Complete clinical data — orders, results, notes, medications, history, imaging, vitals. An infrastructure built over decades and trusted by the majority of U.S. health systems.
A workflow-first interface built for the speed of an ER shift. The data is there. The UX layer that makes it instantly actionable at a glance is not.
The integration concept is an expandable panel on each patient card — a single tap that surfaces the most clinically relevant Epic data without leaving the board view. Not a full EHR. A surgical data window, scoped to what matters in the next 60 seconds.
Concept mockup — illustrates the proposed Epic data integration layer. Not connected to live Epic data.
This vision makes the pitch concrete: the design system, the prioritization logic, and the interaction patterns already exist and have been physician-validated. What remains is the API integration — which Epic controls, and which is the basis of a licensing or consulting conversation.
Most portfolio projects are hypothetical. This one has a real clinical user who tested it, gave feedback, and shaped the design.
Urgent toggle too close to the dismiss button — accidental removals. No way to undo a dispo action. Priority needed clinical language (Critical / Urgent / Stable), not binary flags. Complaints needed to be editable mid-shift.
Priority moved inline as a tappable pill next to the complaint tag. All Next Best Action states made reversible. Three-tier clinical priority system added. Complaint tags made tappable for mid-shift correction.
That feedback loop — physician identifies friction, designer resolves it — is exactly the process health tech companies need and rarely get. It's also the process that would continue in a consulting engagement.
"Epic has the data. The missing layer is a mobile UX built for the speed of clinical decision-making. This prototype proves the concept, validates the need, and demonstrates what the design system looks like — with a real physician's endorsement that it works."
— Jamie Iha, Designer & StrategistThe EHR market is not going to be disrupted from the outside. But its UX can be improved from the inside — through consulting partnerships, design licensing, or embedded design work with health systems who already run Epic and know its limitations firsthand.
This project exists to start that conversation. The prototype is the proof. The case study is the pitch.