Modernizing a Canadian Enterprise EMR Platform Cieden

Executive summary

Client

Clinicmaster is a leading Canadian enterprise healthcare software provider serving multidisciplinary clinics across multiple provinces and expanding into the US market

Challenge

Transitioning a complex enterprise desktop application into a modern, cloud-based, AI-first EMR platform while maintaining high-velocity workflows for power users. This involved standardizing a fragmented UI across 7–9 distinct portals and establishing a cohesive design system for a 30-person development team.

Team composition

1 Product Designer, 2 UX/UI Designers

Outcome

An intuitive, high-velocity, regulatory-compliant EMR interface that minimizes cognitive load, eliminates manual “mental math” for clinic staff, and establishes an AI-driven blueprint for future clinical workflows.

  • Restructured navigation

    Restructured navigation across a platform spanning patient records, billing, and AI-assisted charting

  • A scalable design system

    A scalable design system foundation built to support a platform used across 20+ healthcare specialties

  • A validated UX direction

    A validated UX direction for both doctors and receptionists, ready for continued rollout

01 - The challenge

A powerful product,
buried under its own growth

This is a long-established practice management platform, used by clinics of all sizes — from large multi-provider practices to individual practitioners such as psychotherapists. It handles patient records, billing and financial workflows, and clinical charting during appointments, with recently integrated AI features that generate patient summaries and capture visit transcriptions to help populate charts automatically.

Over decades of active use and continuous feature growth, the navigation model hadn’t kept pace: each new window opened as a cascading layer on top of the previous one, making it easy to lose context, especially when activating additional features mid-task. The needed information often wasn’t immediately accessible, requiring users to navigate elsewhere to find it.

Clinical professional with stethoscope
  • Years in active use

    25+

    years, continuously evolving

  • Depth of functionality

    15,000+

    across patient records, billing, and charting

  • User base

    31,000+

    chart entries created every day

02 - Context

Two key roles, one system

This platform supports the daily operations of medical and behavioral health practices — from scheduling and billing to clinical documentation. Doctors and receptionists share the same system but work in opposite directions: one toward the patient’s case, the other toward the patient’s calendar and account.

User role 01

Doctors

Their day centers on charting: documenting each visit, reviewing AI-generated SOAP notes and summaries, and moving fast between patients without losing context on complex, branching forms.

  • Clinical charting and visit documentation
  • AI-generated SOAP notes (doctor-reviewed)
  • Fast navigation between patients and case history

User role 02

Receptionists

Their day centers on the calendar: booking patients, managing contacts and insurance, and keeping billing moving without appointments slipping through the cracks.

  • Scheduling and calendar management
  • Patient profile, contacts, and insurance details
  • Billing status and invoice creation

03 - Strategic UX process

How we deliver value

When building enterprise healthcare products, we use an “AI-first, logic-first” approach: aligning business analysts, developers, and clinical stakeholders on deep functional requirements before finalizing high-fidelity designs in Figma. This eliminates costly development rework and keeps the product mapped directly to complex, real-world medical workflows.

  • Research and regulation discovery

    Interviews, compliance, IA

  • AI ideation and concept stress-testing

    Concept mapping, edge cases

  • User research

    Usability tests, scripts

  • High-fidelity Figma production

    Design system, UI

  • Technical handoff and dev support

    Specs, sprint support

01 - Research and regulation discovery

Research and regulation discovery

  • The clinical deep-dive: Before pushing pixels, we map the clinic’s full operational ecosystem.
  • “Zero mental math” architecture: information architecture is carefully designed around visual hierarchy, so nothing requires the user to calculate, cross-reference, or remember.
  • Regulatory compliance integration: Canadian provincial frameworks — PIPEDA, regional privacy structures, specialized billing logic — are built directly into the product blueprint from day one.
  • Stakeholder interviews
  • User interviews
  • Competitive analysis
  • AI-assisted synthesis

AI-synthesized research insights affinity board

  • Navigation gets confusing once multiple windows stack up

  • AI summaries are trusted, but always need a quick review step

  • Clinicians spend up to 95% of their time creating clinical notes, which stands as their primary professional frustration.

  • Doctors lose context switching between tabs

  • Enterprise/franchise-level management of thousands of templates requires careful control; forms cannot simply be stacked or merged due to strict external regulatory and funder criteria

  • Solo practitioners need a lighter, faster workflow than large clinics

  • Receptionists want billing and scheduling closer together

  • Finding a past chart takes too many clicks today

  • Clinicians see massive time-saving value in conditional intelligence rather than static forms.

02 - AI ideation and concept stress-testing

AI ideation and concept stress-testing

Accelerating the workflow: We actively integrate AI tools into our UX discovery phase to rapidly map, generate, and explore broad structural concepts before cementing them in design deliverables.

Edge-case stress-testing: We use AI models to run scenarios against complex healthcare pathways, predicting and resolving data-architecture challenges ahead of time to ensure a smooth flow of medical information.

AI ideation workspace with notes, code, and product screens

03 - User research

User research

We run structured usability testing and interview sessions directly with clinicians, using interactive scripts to capture their workflows, uncover hidden needs, and secure vital product feedback before engineering begins.

User research notes and interview synthesis boards

04 - High-fidelity Figma production

High-fidelity Figma production

High-density UI translation: we transform abstract data requirements into scannable, component-driven design systems optimized for power users.

The design system was built on Untitled UI as a base and adapted to the brand and product's needs, with documentation maintained in Confluence for engineering handoff.

Figma screens and the component library

05 - Technical handoff and dev implementation support

Technical handoff and dev implementation support

Comprehensive handoff packages: transitioning to code involves a highly detailed spec package. We deliver explicit interaction behaviors and work side-by-side with product teams to embed precise functional specs and layout requirements in Confluence.

Continuous engineering support: our job continues through active implementation. We stay fully embedded with the engineering team during development sprints — answering edge-case logic questions, participating in review cycles, and verifying that the final interactive build perfectly preserves both user intent and regional regulatory safety.

Technical handoff screens: Confluence specs, chart creation, and upload states
Core feature showcase: deep clinical complexity made simple

Five areas where the old navigation model broke down most often — rebuilt so nothing requires a user to calculate, cross-reference, or remember.

1. Records

  • The problem: opening one chart detail at a time and having to go back and forth.
  • The UX solution: introduced a document tree paired with document details on the right side.
  • The innovation: added a collapsible Tools panel on the right with AI summary, transcript, coding, journal, and tasks.
After — charting review

After

Before — charting review

Before

2. AI charting and interactive template picker

  • The problem: hidden or redundant functionality, feature repetition, and different behavior for manual charting versus AI charting — e.g. no access to historical chart notes or coding. AI charting tools speed up documentation but risk corrupting complex legal medical records if users accidentally combine incompatible advanced structures, like interactive FLEX forms.
  • The UX solution: combined all technical form types (FLEX forms, PDF forms) into a single template type, and moved transcript and AI case summary into the same panel.
  • The innovation: added a quick clinical-observations feature so a provider can flag details such as a patient’s body language, preventing AI-generated notes from overriding what was actually observed and said.
After — chart creation

After

Before — chart creation

Before

3. Calendar-integrated billing and coverage overlay

  • The problem: accessing quick patient information — billing, coverage, treatment plan — meant leaving the calendar entirely.
  • The UX solution: combined a card overlay with a side panel, organized into tabs with quick, relevant info in each, inside a single dashboard view.
  • The innovation: booking status and payment badges now render right on the calendar card, so receptionists can resolve billing and coverage questions without opening a separate screen.
After — calendar sidebar

After

Before — calendar sidebar

Before

4. Services and products grouped by appointment

  • The problem: Billing line items rendered as one flat, ungrouped list. Front-desk staff had no way to tell which services and products belonged to which visit, making it slow to review, invoice, or reconcile charges for a specific appointment.
  • The UX solution: Services and products are now grouped under the appointment they were rendered on, with each group showing its date, provider, clinic, status, and subtotal.
  • The innovation: summary cards for total charges, credits, paid, client owing, and payer owing sit above the list, and each group supports bulk selection for one-click invoicing across multiple selected services.
After — billing services

After

Before — billing services

Before

5. Dynamic “Clinical Metrics” & Graphical Visualizations

  • The problem: Vitals (quick entries like blood pressure or heart rate) and Outcome Measures (long-form 20-question standardized orthopedic tests) were siloed, preventing clinicians from seeing holistic patient recovery curves.
  • The UX solution: We combined these data streams into a unified “Clinical Metrics” ecosystem featuring dual-Y-axes longitudinal graphs.
  • The innovation: Clinicians can overlay a patient’s objective physiological data (e.g., heart rate) directly over subjective scores (e.g., Lower Extremity Functional Scale).
  • Zero Mental Math:  Added automatic normative range shading and trend vectors (↑ 5%), enabling providers to instantly evaluate a patient’s “recovery trajectory” for insurance adjusters.
Modernizing a Canadian Enterprise EMR Platform Cieden

6. Tablet-optimized layouts

Alongside the desktop redesign, we adapted the highest-traffic patient screens — treatment plans, billable items, and appointments — into dedicated tablet layouts, so providers moving between rooms with an iPad get the same “zero mental math” clarity in a single-column, touch-friendly format.

Modernizing a Canadian Enterprise EMR Platform Cieden

7. Working as an embedded design partner

This product had been built over many years primarily by an engineering team working directly from business and stakeholder requirements. There was no dedicated design process in place: decisions about interface and user flow were made implicitly, during implementation, without structured validation.

Joining as a UX/UI consultant meant introducing design as a discipline from scratch. Research, concept validation, usability testing and a shared design system became part of the workflow where none of that had existed before. Decisions that had previously been made by assumption started to be grounded in what users actually needed.

  • Before

    • Features were scoped and built directly from business and stakeholder requirements
    • No structured UX process or design validation before development
    • Design decisions made implicitly, during implementation
    • Engineering and product worked in parallel without a shared design reference
  • After

    • Features were scoped and built directly from business and stakeholder requirements
    • Design exploration and concept validation built into the workflow before development
    • Decisions grounded in user research, usability testing, and structured design thinking
    • A living design system used as the shared reference between design and engineering
    • Active participation in implementation cycles: reviewing builds, flagging UX regressions, and resolving edge cases during development

What made this approach work

  • Reduced iteration waste: by establishing clear strategic logic and running concept stress-tests through AI tools first, we drastically cut down the traditional back-and-forth between business analysts and engineering teams during sprint grooming.

  • Clinical handoff precision: our Figma files are organized as explicit development specs. Developers don’t guess alignment or logic states — they receive predictable, fully mapped interactive states, input field validations, and error behaviors.

  • Clinical domain expertise: we speak fluent healthcare. We understand the difference between a CPT code, a provincial insurance policy countdown, and the operational pressure a front-desk coordinator faces. We design software that protects medical billing and respects provider time.

Max Di Paola

Max Di Paola

Owner, ADDA TECH Inc.

I had the pleasure of working closely with Iryna and her team at Cieden during a major initiative to modernize the entire Clinicmaster user experience.

From the very beginning, Iryna demonstrated exceptional leadership and a deep understanding of both UI/UX craft and the realities of healthcare software. She quickly grasped the complexity of our clinical workflows and helped translate them into clearer, faster interfaces for doctors and clinic staff.

What stood out was how thoughtfully the team approached product design — balancing regulatory constraints, power-user density, and a scalable design system that our engineering team could actually ship against.

Cieden didn’t just deliver screens. They embedded into our process, challenged assumptions with research, and stayed accountable through implementation. That partnership materially improved how we design and deliver Clinicmaster.

I would recommend Iryna and Cieden to any healthcare product organization that needs serious UX leadership on a complex EMR platform.

Iryna Serednia — Design Director & Co-founder

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