A mobile-first solution that allows surgeons to quickly document surgeries, collaborate with colleagues, and access long-term analytics, enabling outcome tracking, research, and continuous professional growth.
I started this project after observing a surgeon at a government hospital in Chandigarh keeping detailed surgical records on WhatsApp on his phone.
I asked him basic questions about his work:
"How many ACL repairs did you perform last year?"
"What's your complication rate?"
He didn't have an exact answer.
His hospital had a Medical Records Department, but accessing a file meant multiple applications and a month of waiting until he finally receives the patient file. So, like thousands of surgeons across India, he'd adapted: WhatsApp for quick notes, Google Drive for files, and paper records that sometimes got lost.
This isn't a productivity problem. This is a learning problem. Without outcome data, surgeons can't improve their practice. Hospitals can't identify patterns. Research can't advance.
I wanted to understand how widespread this was.
What 12 Surgeons Taught Us: Key Themes from Research
I conducted 12 semi-structured interviews with practicing surgeons across tier 1 and tier 2 Indian cities, working in both government teaching hospitals and private surgical centers.
Direct outreach through hospital networks and surgeon referrals
Duration
30–45 minute interviews
Research Sample
10 male, 2 female surgeons
Specialties: Orthopedics (5), Surgery (2), ENT (2), Radiology (3)
Experience: 4–20 years in practice
Settings: 2 government teaching hospitals, 2 private hospitals
Geographic: North India
Insight 1
Hospital EMR = 15–20 min/proc
Willingness threshold: <2 min/proc
All 12 surgeons cited time pressure as the primary reason they use workarounds.
Insight 2
9 of 12 surgeons used multiple tools:
WhatsApp + Google Drive + Hospital EMR (6)
Paper + WhatsApp + Hospital EMR (2)
Hospital EMR only (1)
Insight 3
Surgeons use phones, not computers:
Hands often wet or gloved
Need to move quickly between ORs
May use device one-handed
Insight 4
Doctors want to compare outcomes.
"50 ACL repairs, how many succeeded? What went wrong with failures?"
Registries: The Global Standard for Tracking Outcomes
In developed countries, national registries track all surgeries.
For Example: When a patient gets a joint replacement in the UK, it goes on the National Joint Registry. If revision surgery is needed, it's flagged.
The registry shows:
How many surgeries you've done
How many succeeded vs. failed
What caused the failures
Trends in your performance over time
India lacks such registries at the national level. Personal documentation is the first step toward building them.
How Might We
Make a system that respects surgeon constraints (time, context, trust) and delivers on hidden needs (outcome data, professional growth)
Feature Priority Matrix
Feature Priority: Impact vs. Effort (What Gets Built When?)
View User Persona, Journey Maps, Information Architecture, Flows and Wireframes →
Home Page
Since there's a high patient load in India, surgeons generally remember the diagnosis more than the patient name.
Active Cases appear on top based on the order of case severity.
Feed reflects any changes made by a team member on any case, which helps keep track of progress.
Quick Documentation
Ideated on a quick way to document where further fields keep on reducing based on the diagnosis.
Surgeons can upload discharge summary or verbally narrate a case that will be auto filled using speech to text technology.
Patient Data
Case cards present key details about each case, allowing surgeons to quickly skim and identify a patient.
Combination of Filters and Search enables surgeons to find past cases with ease.
Patient's Digital File
Surgeons can categorize cases based on Case Difficulty, and can bookmark important cases.
Surgeons can upload discharge summary or verbally narrate a case that will be auto filled using speech to text technology.
Surgeon's Team
Surgeons can view cases that they did with their team members across speciaities.
Notifications can be viewed from the home page where user is alerted when someone adds the user to a new case.
Design Improvements After Usability Testing (Reflected in the Final Solution)
The Result
Final Figures
Since the product still isn’t published for use, there was no scope of public testing yet. However, we conducted usability testing on the same users we interviewed before.
Here’s a summary of our usability testing.
Documentation time is 5x faster
From 10-15 minutes per procedure to < 2 minutes, surgeons were able to quickly log a new case using simple methods like uploading discharge summaries, and fields with drop-downs.
Collaboration increased efficiency by 3x
On average, 3–4 doctors are involved in a single case. However, only one of them needs to save or document the case, rather than each doctor doing it individually.
Further Steps
Speciality-Specific Design
Most SaaS products try to be "one solution for everyone." In this case, we want to cater to different specialities based on their workflow. The current solution is orthopedics focused.
Learnings
Behavioral Insights ≠ Emotional Insights
Designing only for user behavior can miss the emotional response behind it. For example, while surgeons said they wanted peer comparison, testing revealed some felt uncomfortable being directly compared. Hence "peer comparison" was changed to "benchmark your growth"
2. Friction Beats Features
Adoption depends more on speed than functionality. For instance, surgeons preferred quick WhatsApp notes (1–2 minutes) over a feature-rich system that required 5–10 minutes for case entry.