GoInvo

Boston design studio GoInvo works on enterprise and healthcare software, taking products from early ideas through to shipped, adopted systems. It was founded in 2009 and has a long record in regulated sectors, where clinical, payer and federal rules shape almost every screen. The studio describes its team as deliberately small and based in Boston, with designers who take part in a project from start to finish.

Software for regulated work

GoInvo designs clinical, payer and patient software that has to satisfy HIPAA and FDA requirements without becoming hard to use. The studio's working method starts by mapping how people actually move through a task, and only then decides what the interface should look like. Its health IT work covers infrastructure, precision medicine and genomics, public health and policy, and open source health design.

Case work named by the studio includes a hospital coding operation buried under a large backlog of patient charts, where throughput, accuracy and auditability all had to improve together. It also cites an analyst workflow at a global research firm, where manual coding and report assembly had been slowing insight generation, and a state program that moved a large share of SNAP benefit applications online.

Research, design and build

The studio runs the full production cycle: user interviews, analysis and user mapping, ideation, UI and UX design, prototyping, user testing, front-end development, strategy consulting and workshops, with graphic facilitation alongside. Engagements can begin at any stage, from a blank page to a build that has stalled for months, and the studio then works inside the client's team until the product ships.

Open source frameworks and published work

Beyond client work, GoInvo releases open source frameworks carrying either a CC BY 4.0 or an Apache 2.0 license. One is a model of the factors that shape a person's health, used in universities and on product teams, which has been cited more than 2,000 times, Wikipedia among those citing it. Another is a one-glance visualization of a patient's health metrics, which clinicians, researchers and electronic health record vendors have adopted. The studio also features in a book on health design thinking that draws on a decade of its case studies.

Clients and reputation

The studio's clients range from very large American companies and federal bodies to hospitals, health payers and newly funded startups. Named client work includes Ipsos, 3M, Memorial Hermann and the State of Massachusetts, and the studio reports that many clients return for a second engagement. It argues that generalist consultancies staff projects from whichever practice has capacity, whereas its own team has only ever designed software, with particular depth in regulated and healthcare work.