Healthcare providers were trapped in a difficult position. They relied on $100k+ legacy systems that hadn't evolved in decades, yet any change risked patient safety.

Most healthcare organizations still rely on CDs to deliver medical imaging to their patients. These systems required massive local installations, making remote work impossible, a critical limitation we'd discover during COVID-19.

Doctors needed instant access to massive medical files (300MB+ DICOM studies) on any device, anywhere. The tolerance for errors was zero. A misread scan could mean a misdiagnosis, and a system crash during surgery could be catastrophic.

On top of technical requirements, we had to navigate HIPAA compliance, which traditionally favors conservative, established designs over innovation.

Medicai was my main project during my tenure at Atta Systems.

As the lead product designer starting 2020, I was responsible for the end-to-end product design process from initial research through implementation, including designing and building the marketing website that now serves 60k+ monthly users.

When I joined the project, I spent months embedding myself in Romanian hospitals, interviewing doctors, managers, and even patients facing severe health issues in order to fully understand the magnitude of the issues we were facing. What I discovered challenged every assumption I had about modern UX.

‍Key Learnings — Doctors weren't necessarily resistant to new technology. They were traumatized by previous failed implementations. This realization shaped our entire design philosophy. I learned that ~75% of diagnostic errors happened during handoffs between systems.

The interface needed to be invisible, not innovative.

I documented dozens of different user flows across multiple user types, including radiologists who need speed and precision above all, referring physicians who want quick answers, patients confused by medical terminology, administrators who care about compliance, and technicians who manage the daily workflow.

The existing workflow was shockingly antiquated. Image sharing still happened via burned CDs in 2019 (and it still happens that way today in a lot of cases). Uploading a single study required multiple steps across multiple systems, and most users shared their imaging files using WeTransfer, which was never designed for sending sensitive medical data. Email chains with 50MB attachment limits meant critical images often arrived pixelated or not at all.

Lost studies sometimes required repeated radiation exposure: an unacceptable risk we had to eliminate.

I pioneered a rapid iteration approach that compressed months of traditional design into days. One day of shadowing would yield observations of real workflows and pain points. Those insights immediately translated into dozens of wireframes exploring solutions while the insights were fresh.

Within days, we'd have multiple prototypes tested with actual users, on 1:1 interviews via video calls or visits on location.

This methodology led to breakthrough insights, like discovering that doctors preferred darker interfaces not (just) for aesthetics, but mainly because they review images in dimly lit reading rooms to better perceive subtle contrast differences in scans.

Implementing a zero-footprint DICOM viewer that could replace $100k desktop software became one of our centerpiece challenges.

I studied how radiologists actually read images, spending hours learning to read scans myself. The workflow was intricate: window/level adjustments every 3-5 seconds, rapid scrolling through 200+ slices, constant measurement and annotation, and side-by-side historical comparisons.
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Besides that, healthcare professionals needed an easy and secure way to collaborate on medical imaging, regardless of their location or their device. We had to ensure they can easily access patient files, respond to comments, and upload and view any relevant documents (PDFs, images, Word documents, etc.) besides DICOM imaging files.

The Medicai platform maintains full HIPAA and GDPR compliance, plus ISO 27001 certification for information security management and ISO 9001 for quality management systems, meeting regulatory requirements across the US, EU, and international markets.

Rather than building one interface that satisfies no one, we've created a three-tier interface strategy. Patients see one-click viewing with plain language and simple sharing via link. Referring physicians get essential tools with a focus on comparison.