e-health collaborative
16MM patients in one system. How do you design a human face for the infrastructure of healthcare—and make clinicians actually want to use it?
Brooklyn Health Information Exchange (BHIX) and Healthix were regional health information organizations in New York City—long-since merged and now part of NYeC, the New York eHealth Collaborative. Their mission: connect hospital systems, post-acute facilities, and physician practices through a shared clinical data platform that makes coordinated care possible across the city. The technology was there. What they needed was design that would make clinicians want to use it—and that would bring new providers into the network.
CHALLENGE
Both BHIX and Healthix were at the same inflection point: robust platforms, growing user bases, and digital experiences that hadn’t kept pace with either. BHIX needed a redesigned clinical portal that could surface its full range of services—training, messaging, patient search, alerts—without overwhelming the clinicians who depended on it daily. Healthix needed a complete website redesign: new information architecture, a refreshed visual system, and a marketing platform strong enough to migrate and register providers into the network at scale. Underneath both projects was the same core question: how do you design for trust? OUR
APPROACH
We worked with each organization through a structured process grounded in brand clarity and user-centered design—starting where all good design starts: with people. For Healthix, we facilitated a brand values workshop with leadership to identify the personality traits that were genuinely theirs—not generic healthcare language, but the specific qualities that made Healthix distinct. We mapped target segments and the messages, features, and outcomes that mattered to each.
This became the foundation for a full site redesign: updated information architecture across approximately all templates, a new visual design system, and a humanized experience that gave every user a clear path based on their relationship with Healthix—and that could actively drive provider registration into the network.
For BHIX, we reviewed portal demos and requirements, conducted user interviews to understand clinician attitudes and high-value feature needs, and ran visual studies to establish brand tone.
We then delivered the clinical portal landing page across three iterative design rounds—developing iconography, typography, and color to support the platform’s core modules—and handed off production-ready assets to the technical team. In both cases, our north star was the same: design that enables collaboration across care settings by making the platform feel as trustworthy as the clinical teams using it.
RESULTS
The system is used by Downstate hospitals, nursing homes and numerous physician practices and provides access to the health records of over 16 million patients.
A clinical portal for BHIX enabling seamless sharing of patient data and care coordination across hospital systems, post-acute facilities, and physician practices
A redesigned Healthix marketing website and provider onboarding platform to migrate and register providers into the network
Updated site organization across ~15 templates with a new visual design system built for adoption and awareness Defined brand values and target segment profiles giving both teams a shared language for communicating their mission
Production-ready design assets and a visual style guide to ensure consistency across future development Health information is only as powerful as the systems people trust enough to open—and act on.
We’re proud to have helped these organizations build that trust, one screen at a time.
