1.01 Why Healthcare UX is Different, Not Just Harder - with Eric Shumake
In the debut episode of Healthcare UX, I’m chatting with Eric Shumake, founder of HXR Labs, who's spent 20+ years in healthcare UX research. His core argument: healthcare UX isn't regular UX with extra rules — it's a different discipline entirely, one where lives, careers, and lawsuits are on the line, not a pizza delivered to the wrong address. We dig into why clinicians are "trained out of" the very empathy designers are trained into (and how to bridge that gap), the real stakeholder hierarchy that decides what actually ships — legal, then revenue, then physicians, with designers near the bottom — and the alert-fatigue and "AI hangover" risks of bolting AI onto clinical workflows.
"Clinicians do not hate empathy. They just have a very different definition of it. The empathy we're trained into as designers is what clinicians are trained out of." -Eric Shumake
Eric also makes the case that career-changers' prior experience is an asset, not a liability, and that the fastest way into the field is to stop waiting and build something real.
You can find Eric at:
Website https://www.hxrlabs.com
