Why better care starts with physicians as part of the design process

Sonja Tarrago: ©DexCare

In health care, we often associate innovation with images of sleek technology, AI-powered tools, and digital-first platforms. But for physicians caring for patients, adoption that isn’t grounded in day-to-day clinical reality can feel more like disruption than progress. A tool that looks promising in a demo may create more friction than value once deployed in the clinic or across a care team. Tech alone isn’t enough. True innovation requires early and ongoing collaboration between technology developers and the clinicians, nurses, and operational leaders who use these tools to deliver care.

When tools don’t align with the realities of care delivery, it can create a fragmented system. Communication breaks down between care team members, referrals stall, and follow-ups slip through the cracks. The cost isn’t just administrative; it’s also clinical. For physicians, this translates to more time navigating systems, increased cognitive burden, and less time with patients. For health systems, the financial and clinical toll of disjointed care continues to grow.

Effective innovation starts when developers, designers, and decision-makers sit at the same table as care teams to understand their needs, pain points, and workflows. Only then can we design solutions that advance care instead of adding complexity.

True innovation starts with collaboration

Too often, health care innovation is equated with launching something new. But new doesn’t always mean useful – true progress is measured by impact. It means having a deeper understanding of clinical workflows, operational realities, and the human elements that shape care every day.

That impact isn’t possible unless all parties work together. This requires involving clinicians and health system leaders from the start – not just in testing the solution, but in shaping it. When frontline users are left out of the process, tools may look good on paper, but disrupt existing workflows in reality. When clinicians are brought in early, the result is a solution that’s functional, intuitive, beneficial, and sustainable.

Technological implementation should fit into the existing rhythm of care, not force clinicians to work around it. That means aligning a new solution with how decisions are made, how teams communicate, and how patients move across settings. To reduce the daily friction for clinicians, the organization should aim to address the friction points clinicians encounter daily, ensuring designs consider the needs of the end user, not just the buyer.

The cost of delayed care: A system under strain

When innovation fails to align with care delivery, it doesn’t just frustrate physicians, it hits health systems where it hurts – cost, capacity, and patient outcomes.

Disconnected tools and fragmented workflows lead to delayed care and real consequences. Patients wait longer for critical diagnoses or follow-ups, conditions worsen, and the window for early intervention closes. What begins as a coordination failure quickly becomes a clinical and financial burden—one that compounds across every corner of the system.

The price tag for delayed or poorly coordinated care can be steep. Higher utilization, avoidable downstream costs, and mounting pressure on already strained clinical teams are just the beginning. One missed referral can mean potentially tens of thousands in revenue loss. Across a health system, that adds up to millions in inefficiencies that no organization can afford to ignore.

While the clinical and financial stakes are high, the real danger lies in what goes unresolved. The longer these orchestration gaps persist, the more they pull health systems away from their core goal – delivering timely, high-quality care at a sustainable cost.

Building physician trust in innovation

Innovation fatigue is real. After what can feel like years of rolling out new tools that promised transformation but delivered the opposite, clinicians have grown wary. Every new platform, every added layer to the workflow, comes with a silent question: “Will this actually help me care for my patients—or just slow me down?”

When systems prioritize features over fit, or novelty over need, it erodes trust in the tool and in the system behind it. Without trust, any solution, no matter how beneficial, becomes just another obstacle. Rebuilding that trust requires more than technical fixes; it demands a return to the fundamentals: listening to clinicians, understanding their daily challenges, and solving real problems at the point of care.

Technology has the potential to ease the strain on health care systems, but only if it is built with the real needs of providers in mind. To do so, tech developers will need to earn the confidence of those delivering care every day, ensuring that the tools and workflows are designed with them, not just for them. That’s the real opportunity.

As delays in care compound and the financial stakes rise, neither health systems nor technology developers can afford to treat orchestration as an afterthought. Lasting progress demands more than novel tools; it requires a disciplined, collaborative approach grounded in the realities of clinical care. That’s why it’s essential to include clinicians not only on digital transformation teams within health systems, but also within the teams developing the actual technologies meant to support them. The future of health care will belong to systems that close the gap between ambition and execution—where every innovation moves in lockstep with the delivery of care.

Sonja Tarrago, MD, FAAP, is head of Physician Strategy and Engagement at DexCare.