Francisco Duran

Context

HiSalud was built to give patients access to medical and veterinary care from their phones. The platform aimed to cover the full care cycle: discovering professionals, booking consultations, attending them remotely, and managing health records for the whole family — all in one place.

Prescriptions and medical certificates issued through the platform carried official Ministry of Health approval, giving the service legal weight alongside its convenience.

The product served two distinct user groups: patients seeking convenient access to healthcare, and licensed medical and veterinary professionals delivering it remotely. I focused my work on the patient side, designing the flows that formed the core of the experience.

Challenges

Designing for a two-sided healthcare platform introduced challenges that went beyond typical consumer app flows.

On the patient side, the core tension was in professional discovery. Unlike booking with a known doctor, HiSalud's model required patients to browse and choose from a catalog of unfamiliar professionals. The design needed to surface enough information — credentials, specialty, availability — to support a confident decision, without overwhelming a user who may already be dealing with the stress of a health concern.

Booking also needed to account for the fact that patients don't always book for themselves. A parent managing a child's care, or an adult coordinating for an elderly family member, needed the flow to feel natural for both cases without adding unnecessary complexity.

The consultation experience itself required attention to transitional states — the moments between booking and connection that are easy to overlook but critical for trust. A patient waiting for a doctor to join, or landing on a post-consultation screen, needs clarity and reassurance at each step.

Finally, working in a fast-moving early-stage environment meant making design decisions with limited time for research, while still maintaining consistency and laying groundwork for a design system that could support the platform as it evolved.

Solution

Onboarding and family management

Sign-up included facial recognition for identity verification, establishing a trust baseline from the first interaction. The flow also introduced family group management early, allowing users to add members during onboarding. This kept the feature lightweight at entry while enabling a key capability — booking on behalf of others — to work seamlessly downstream.

Professional catalog and booking

The professional catalog used a grid layout, balancing density with readability. Each card gave patients the essentials at a glance, with a full profile view available for those who wanted more detail before deciding: professional background, credentials, and real-time availability.

The booking flow was kept intentionally short and linear. After selecting a professional, users chose who the consultation was for, picked a date and time, and completed payment. The sequence front-loads decision-making into the discovery phase, so the booking steps themselves feel like confirmation rather than deliberation.

Consultation experience

The video call interface was designed around the patient's emotional journey as much as the functional one. A waiting room screen acknowledged the patient's presence and set expectations. The in-call layout kept the interaction focused. A post-consultation screen closed the experience with session details and a professional rating — providing closure and feeding back into the platform's trust signals.

Reflection

HiSalud pivoted from B2C to B2B before the product reached maturity. Looking back, I think the pivot reflected a real tension in the original model that goes beyond design.

In Argentina, many people either have healthcare coverage through their employer — which often already includes some form of telemedicine — or rely on the public health system. The product was asking patients to pay out of pocket for something they either already had or could access for free. That's not a UX problem. It's a value proposition problem, and no amount of good design solves it.

The B2B direction addresses this more naturally: companies offer the platform as a health benefit, the end user still gets care, and the payment model fits how healthcare is already consumed in the market. It's a reminder that the most important design question isn't always about the interface.