The Product in Health podcast interviews Sonia Garcia, Co-founder and Chief Product Officer of Amae Health, about the empathy as a foundation and a driver for healthtech products.

I re-listened to episode 8 of the Product in Health podcast which was a discussion with Sonia Garcia from Amae Health about empathy in products: what it is, where it comes from, how to implement it.

This conversation resonated with me because of the strong community health approach to creating digital health care tools. It underscored the precarious nature of healthtech where highly individualized, deeply personal tailored care must be balanced with a product meant to grow and scale. It can’t be a one-size-fits-all solution, and yet the product must maintain some structure of consistency to be viable in the market.

I love how the product team at Amae, led by Sonia Garcia, is intentional in its approach to designing a digital solution for mental health issues. They’ve identified the problem of a fragmented system of care that fails the individuals they mean to help. Instead of starting at the problem, they look upstream asking very community health-oriented questions:

• Who are these patients as people?
• What is their background?
• What communities are they a part of?
• What are the support structures and resources around them?
• What are their challenges and where have they experienced shortcomings?

These naturally progress into user experience questions:

• What is a patient thinking?
• What is a patient feeling?
• What is a patient’s mental state? How might it change? How might that affect their capacity to use this product?
• What is a patient’s journey in navigating a fractured health system? What can be streamlined?
• What responsibilities are being asked of a patient (who might not be in a clear state of mind) that can be relieved?

What strikes me about Amae’s process is the emphasis on context as the root for empathy. Integrated whole-person health and cultural competency are the standards that any design decision is weighed against. Empathy drives business. Amae doesn’t ask “how can we grow our company into new markets?” They ask “what does that community over there need and how can we extend what we offer to support them, too?”

Because of my background in community health, the way I think about UX design problems is parallel to the way I would approach community health problems. This idea of ‘empathy derived from context’ is an important influence to my work as a UX writer. Empathizing with the internal and external experiences of patients guides how I develop a flow of information, the voice imbued, the language used, and the concepts conveyed.

This conversation is everything that excites and inspires me about healthtech. Stories like these remind me about the importance of the work being done to grow our community capacity for health and the innovative solutions being applied to break down the fractured systems of care to build something new and effective.

Listen to the episode on major podcast apps or watch it on youtube.

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Interested in partnering? Let’s talk to see how I can help you create a comfortable digital health experience. Drop me a note at evy.haan@gmail.com.

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