Digitalisation in healthcare has a central problem: many solutions are developed without regard to what physicians actually need. Despite technological progress in almost every area of life, a hospital visit feels like a journey into the past for many patients. While operating theatres meet the latest technical standards, the wards are dominated by piles of paper, landline telephones and fax machines. According to a 2020 Bitkom survey, 22% of physicians mainly rely on fax when communicating with other practices. For 53%, the telephone is the most important channel for this exchange.
This discrepancy shows that digital offerings exist, but often fail to meet the real challenges of everyday hospital practice. The reasons rarely lie in a lack of technology, but in a lack of user-centred design, confusing interfaces and solutions that do not fit the workflows. As a result, the administrative burden keeps rising. According to the MB-Monitor survey, only 8% of responding physicians spent more than three hours a day on administration and documentation in 2013; by 2022, the figure was already 32%. Despite modern software solutions, the burden has not decreased, because basic design principles were often ignored.
A particularly critical example is patient education before surgical procedures. It has been carried out almost unchanged for more than 60 years, although the scope and complexity of medical information are growing steadily. The legal framework – in particular Section 630e of the German Civil Code (BGB) – defines the duty to inform, but leaves open how modern, up-to-date patient education should be designed. In practice, this means that patients still receive paper-based forms full of technical terms. At the same time, there is scientific evidence that audiovisual and visual patient education increases patients’ knowledge of the procedure.
Nevertheless, many of the digital patient education offerings available are hardly used because they are complicated, confusing or not intuitive. This is exactly where medudoc comes in. Together with hospitals and specialists, the company has developed a platform for creating individualised patient education videos that are tailored to the respective indication and the individual needs of the patient. This personalised form of patient education is already in successful use in German and Swiss hospitals.
Success factors for user-centred digitalisation in everyday hospital practice
Success factor 1: digital solutions must be developed together with physicians and independent hospitals
The idea of video-assisted patient education arose directly from everyday practice in neurosurgery. There, complex procedures have to be explained again and again every day, often in long monologues. The medudoc team identified the need directly with the users. The solution was then developed and tested together with a network of specialists. This early involvement means that the platform actually fits real workflows rather than bypassing them.
Success factor 2: prototypes serve learning – and discarding
Many clinicians are unfamiliar with iterative product development. They are used to judging finished systems. For digital development, however, it is crucial to test prototypes early and often. medudoc developed several versions of the user interface and tested them with different specialist groups. The result was a completely new platform that is much more closely aligned with users’ requirements.
Success factor 3: the technology must be adaptable – not the hospital process
A “one-size-fits-all” approach does not work in healthcare. Hospitals have individual workflows, different responsibilities and varying requirements. medudoc’s platform architecture is therefore deliberately modular. It takes standards, guidelines and current research findings into account, while at the same time allowing flexible adaptation to individual needs. The result is a solution that does not have to be forced into place, but fits in sensibly.
Success factor 4: digital solutions do not replace existing processes, they supplement them meaningfully
The added value of digital patient education lies not in replacing analogue materials, but in changed workflows. Patients receive their individualised video at the optimal moment before the personal discussion with the physician. As a result, they arrive at the consent discussion better informed. At University Hospital Würzburg, the median physician discussion time before cholecystectomy fell from 8.1 to 1.5 minutes (−81%). Before colon resection, it fell from 11.9 to 3.3 minutes (−72%; Leicht et al., World J Surg 2026).
medudoc already cooperates with hospitals in anaesthesia, general surgery and neurosurgery, orthopaedics, urology and ophthalmology. The company is continuously expanding its content and is looking for further partners who want to advance the digitalisation of patient education.
Practice clearly shows: user-centred development is not a “nice to have”, but the basis for digital solutions in healthcare to be accepted, used and successful in the long term. This is exactly where the difference arises between software that fails in everyday hospital practice and solutions that genuinely relieve physicians.
