5 Reasons Why We Need More Clinicians Doing Healthcare & Clinical UX

Clinicians can do a lot more than just treat the sick

Dr Gyles Morrison MBBS MSc
7 min readSep 13, 2019

UPDATE: It’s Aug 7th 2023

A lot has happened over the last half decade since I first wrote this article. I’ve worked hard to better understand what makes the field of Clinical UX unique, which focuses on the experiences clinicians and patients have with healthcare products and services. It’s a field where knowledge of healthcare, medical law, ethics, healthcare behaviour change are mandatory if one is ever to truly make real impact on health outcomes on a global scale.

I’ve also been working with clinicians and non-clinicians alike, training and mentoring them to work in the specialist field of Clinical UX. And in 2023, it is now even more true that we need more clinicians doing Healthcare and Clinical UX. Hopefully the article that follows educates and inspires you, whether you are a clinician, UX professional or not.

My career as a Clinical UX Strategist after working as medical doctor has been the perfect fusion of my passion and interests in both IT and healthcare.

Even before I was a teenager I’ve loved working with computers.

I had no qualms opening up different machines and replacing parts; desktop and laptop computers, PlayStation 2s and 3s, and more. I wanted to know how they worked, how to fix them, and even how to make them better through upgrades.

Image of a PlayStation 3
I regularly opened PlayStation consoles to see if I could upgrade them. I wasn’t always successful. Photo by Nikita Kostrykin on Unsplash

Yet working as an IT professional was not my first profession despite it being a major desire (straight after wanting to be a world renowned writer and artist at the tender age of 5). I worked as a medical doctor for 3 years. Although I loved the patients, I was more than fed up with some of the awful software clinical staff have to use. Worse still is how slow the healthcare industry is at truly taking advantage of modern technology.

“…not enough clinicians work in healthcare IT and too few work in Clinical UX. This needs to change.”

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Dr Gyles Morrison MBBS MSc

Clinical UX Specialist, Clinical UX Academy instructor, international speaker, consciously Antiracist. Opinions my own.