Zus health - Turning Complex Data Into Clarity
Zus Health | Proof of Concept → MVP | Shipped 2022
A 30 seconds overview of this project
This is a 0→1 Health care product called Zus Health
I led the end-to-end design of Zus Health’s MVP a clinical data platform that turns fragmented health records into configurable, usable tools for care teams and developers.
Starting with a design sprint, I helped define the product vision, created scalable systems like widget-based modules and role-based workspaces, and collaborated closely with engineering to ensure everything was flexible, embeddable, and FHIR-compliant.
This work secured $34M in funding and laid the foundation for future integrations and partner adoption.
Also, a friendly note :)
This case study captures the full lifecycle of a 0→1 product : from early concept exploration to MVP launch and beyond. It’s not a one-minute scroll. It’s a detailed look at how I shaped the strategy, design, and execution of a real-world healthcare platform.
If you're here to skim, you’ll still find clear structure, visuals, and outcomes. But if you're here to evaluate how I think, lead, and design at scale this is the story.
Overview & Context
Zus Health is a shared health data platform that unifies patient records from sources like labs, EHRs, and pharmacies into a single, trusted profile for clinicians and developers.
As the first design lead on the team, I helped shape the product vision from the ground up and led the end-to-end design of a scalable, accessible MVP that laid the foundation for the platform.
PRODUCT
Web platform | Saas Application
SKILLS
UX Strategy & Product Thinking, Product & Interaction Design, Collaboration & Leadership, Validation & Impact
TIMELINE
Q2 2021 - Q1 2022
TEAM
Bharat Pothula & Bhanu Kalyan (UXDs), Naveen Chevuru (PM), Ada Glover (Zus - CPO)
IMPACT
Helped secure $34M in funding. Source
Product adopted by 60+ healthcare organizations. Source
Designed and delivered 10+ end-to-end modules, with 5 core modules shipped to production within the first 6 months
Led the creation of the Zus design system to ensure consistency, accessibility, and scalability across all modules (See separate case study)
THE PROBLEM?
Too many sources, not enough clarity.
Imagine you're a primary care doctor about to see a patient. You open your tool and... the allergy list is incomplete. Labs from another system are missing. You spend the next 10 minutes clicking through old PDFs, portals, and faxes just trying to figure out what happened at their last visit somewhere else.
Or maybe you're a developer building a digital health app. You want to show the patient’s medication list, but to get that, you have to piece together messy FHIR feeds, normalize data from multiple sources, and still can’t tell which record is the most up-to-date.
This is what most clinicians and healthcare developers deal with every day
THE VISION?
Zus says : Let me fetch the data for you & display in a digestible manner
Zus was built on a simple idea
"What if patient health data didn’t live in silos but followed the patient wherever they go?"
MY ROLE
I'm a First Designer for this Product!
As the first designer on the project, I led the end-to-end design of Zus Health’s MVP owning everything from early product definition to scalable delivery.
I partnered closely with the CPO, PM, engineers, and clinical advisors to shape the product strategy, structure the user experience, and define what the MVP needed to prove.
As the team grew, I also mentored two other designers helping them ramp up on the product, adopt the design system, and navigate complex healthcare workflows with clarity and consistency.
Delivered a polished proof of concept that helped secure $34M in funding and laid the groundwork for future product expansion.
I translated raw FHIR data and fragmented clinical records into clean, trustworthy modules that clinicians could act on and developers could embed.
I created scalable design patterns and reusable components building the foundations of accessibility, clarity, and modularity across the platform.
I collaborated with engineering to align on technical feasibility, and design for real-world edge cases.
THE CHALLENGE!
When I joined, there was no tool! Just an FHIR place.
This FHIR place is GOLD! But how easy it is for users to digest this information? & How can we get investors believe that this FHIR place works?
🔍
My Note : So.. the challenge wasn’t lack of data! It was lack of clarity, prioritization, and context. I should focus on designing systems that surfaced what mattered without overwhelming.
EARLY RESEARCH & DISCOVERY
So, we started with a "Design Sprint"
We followed the Design sprint methodology to create an MVP that helps us validate the solution with the potential customers before investing time and development efforts.
Design sprint plan
Expert Interviews & Insights to Rescue
And these are the Personas that shaped our design
And HMWs to spark ideas and be grounded research!
"HMW enable Care Builders to customize care according to their workflow?"
"HMW provide visibility into past diagnosis data from other providers?"
"HMW support integrations and seamless data sync within orgs?"
"HMW centralize tools to reduce care delivery fragmentation?"
DELIVERING THE PROOF OF CONCEPT
After all the hard work, we delivered a Proof Of Concept
And this clickable PoC enabled us to validate the vision and use in investor conversations. A small overview of what we designed :
EARLY WINS & TRACTION
Initial Success
This PoC helped secure $34M in funding and align stakeholders around product value.
Source link - Zus Health Closes $34M Series A
DEFINING THE MVP
From POC to Scalable Modules
The POC validated the concept, but the real challenge was: which modules should we build first, and how could they flex for different roles?
We conducted role-based interviews and shadowing with clinicians, admins, and analysts. Insights were clear:
Care teams wanted quick snapshots of patients
Builder admins wanted integration reliability
INITIAL IDEATION & USABILITY TESTING
Designing the workspace set up experience - from SCRATCH!
After validating the core concept with our POC, our next challenge was figuring out how users would actually interact with the platform day-to-day. We began by testing early workspace modules, giving care teams full control to build their own environments from scratch.
But results were unexpected:
Care Team users were confused: “Why am I setting this up? I just want to see my patients.”
Builder admins, on the other hand, immediately connected with the model : “This feels like configuring AWS or Slack. I can do this.”
ITERATING & VALIDATING
This insight reframed our strategy to make it Admin-Driven.
We realized setup should be admin-driven, not clinician-driven. Care teams needed clarity and speed, not configuration.
We iterated and tested a new approach where,
Builder admins handled the setup and configuration, taking on the heavy lifting.
Care team users were simply provided with a ready-to-use workspace so all they had to do was view and act on the data.
REFRAMING OUR STRATEGY
The outcome was more than usability
it gave us a scalable design framework. New integrations could be added as widgets, and the platform could flex for different roles without fragmenting into multiple products.
After launching the core patient overview, we extended the same system to other modules:
Every module reused the same components, patterns, and backend integrations showing that the system we built wasn’t just flexible. It was durable.
System Reflections : These weren’t one-off UI decisions. Each of these modules reused the same widget logic, component patterns, and FHIR data mapping from earlier work turning our design system into infrastructure.
Core feature #2 : Patient Overview
The patient overview became the heart of the platform the first screen clinicians saw when opening a record. Strategically, it solved one of the biggest workflow gaps: scattered, incomplete patient information spread across multiple systems.
Core feature #3 : Customization Without Chaos
Healthcare teams work with vast, complex data. The challenge wasn’t just surfacing it but ensuring each role only saw what was relevant without overwhelming them.
Core feature #4 : Admin Features: Role Management
Health organizations have different users (e.g., physicians, nurses, billing staff, IT admins). Not everyone should see or edit all data. Without granular control, there's risk of error or privacy violations (HIPAA risk).
Core Feature #5: Data Modelling for Power Users
Data modeling in Zus is essential to structure and customize FHIR-based patient data, enabling accurate, usable, and compliant health records.
Design × Dev
I worked closely with engineering across the modules. Our goal was to ensure every design decision was technically feasible, scalable, and future-proof especially as we moved toward embeddable components and partner integrations.
So this is not just collaboration. We co-created infrastructure that’s still being built on today.
This model became the blueprint for how all future widgets were developed, reused, and embedded into partner environments.
Impact & Outcomes
After launching the core patient overview, we extended the same system to other modules:
Takeaways
Designing for scale starts early - Strategic systems thinking helped us build not just a usable tool, but a foundation that supported reusability, customization, and integrations.
B2B design isn’t about flashy UI - It’s about reducing friction, surfacing the right information, and earning trust through clarity.
Collaboration is everything - From shaping the MVP vision with leadership to debugging state logic with engineering, this project taught me how to align across product, dev, and user needs fast.
