Healing
Track
A proven therapy for chronic pain could only reach as many people as a few specialist coaches could see. I led design on the platform that takes it further, from research with people in pain to an AI coach they could trust. The first clinic went live in under six months.
Sixty-five million Americans live with chronic pain, and many of them have been told there's nothing left to try. Pain Reprocessing Therapy treats pain as a signal the brain learned, and can unlearn. In a Mount Sinai randomized trial it cut pain by 53.7%, against 15.1% for conventional care. The hard part was never the science. It was reach.
Healing Track came to us with early mockups no patient had seen, and a returning CPO with one instruction: we don't want to build something we need to scrap. The constraints were real from day one. Health data under HIPAA. One product serving many health plans and employers. And coaches who are scarce, trusted, and the reason the therapy works.
What I owned. The design direction, and how design worked with research, engineering and the client's leadership. I led a senior product designer, partnered with a researcher and two engineers, and worked side by side with the CPO and the founder. I made the calls on what the product would personalize, what the AI would never do, and when to build something nobody had asked for.
Understand people first.
Then design.
My first call was to slow the screens down. Before we drew anything, we proposed to the CPO that we meet the people the product was for. She agreed, and that decision shaped everything after it.
Let patients set the brief.
Healing Track gave us a library of anonymized coaching transcripts from its clinical trials, more than any team could read by hand. The team used AI agents to synthesize them, pulling out the turning points and the exact words patients used for their pain. Those stories became our personas and journey map, and the evidence behind two rounds of moderated research with people living with chronic pain.
The biggest finding was about framing. People in pain want emotional support, but they trust evidence. One participant went from “right now, it’s not for me” to “if it’s framed correctly, I would be very interested” in a single session. That pointed us toward a science-backed course, and away from adding features.
Behavioral science sat underneath it all. Dr. Devorah Klein’s Adherence Loop (believe, frame, know, prompt, act, reinforce) shaped every decision, from onboarding to the coach’s role between sessions.
Put the person closest to patients on the screens.
I led the design effort with a senior product designer, who owned the early prototyping, research and analysis. We paired on the interviews and the synthesis, then on carrying what we learned into the final designs. The person who had heard the patients’ words was the one shaping the screens.
The researcher’s six personas became the personalization model, so her work showed up on every screen. And because the research kept changing the product, I built the process around redesign. Three full directions went to the client while they were still gray boxes and cheap to throw away. The client killed two. Strategy got decided at the cheapest possible fidelity.
Six relationships to pain.
Chronic pain doesn’t produce one kind of patient. The research gave us six, organized on one axis: push toward the work, or permit rest. The Rational Skeptic gets evidence and momentum. The Struggling Navigator gets one step and nothing else, because a full plate is exactly what they can’t face on a bad day.
The Steady Endurer, who would white-knuckle the program and call it fine, gets something few apps offer. It stops asking. Rest counts as progress, and the only button on the screen says “Done for today.”
One source of truth.
Design and engineering usually build the same product twice, once in Figma and once in code. We agreed early to skip that. The design system started from what was already in the codebase: its structure, components and real constraints. Designs went back to the team as working UI code, and the developers picked them up as they landed.
The result was 208 components, light and dark, and a rule I care about more than the count: development never waited on design. Feasibility was never a separate phase, because the system was built inside the constraints from the start.
Trust is the design problem.
Patients needed help between sessions. As one put it, “sometimes you need someone right then. Not next Tuesday.” But they trusted their human coach and were wary of the machine: “if it was only AI and there wasn’t a person, it might deter me.”
An AI coach wasn’t on the roadmap. I built a working prototype in two days anyway, because the hard part was already done. The founder’s book, seventeen real coaching sessions and recorded conversations became a written coaching model, where every rule traces to something a therapist actually said. The demo moved our own team from “that’s not what this product is” to shipping it.
Then the research set the rules. Tell people up front when AI is involved, because “if I’m not told, I feel like I’m getting lied to.” Keep a human coach reviewing what the AI produces. Personalize only from what a patient actually did and shared, hand the deep work back to the coach, and never encourage use for its own sake. We designed a trust layer more than a chat window, and our engineers built it as a guarded system: every message screened, and a dedicated crisis path before the coach ever answers.
First clinic, July 8
Real patients working through chronic pain with their coaches, in under six months. In the client's words, a week earlier than planned.
Nothing deferred
From an empty backlog to a complete first version, with no scope dropped along the way.
Never the bottleneck
Through every redesign, design was never the reason anybody waited.
“8th Light built the platform that finally helped us scale this treatment, and they built it the right way: they sought input from people living with chronic pain and our coaches before designing anything, and they protected the human relationship at the heart of the therapy instead of automating it away.” Alan Gordon, founder, author of The Way Out
Measure from the first screen.
The real outcome story will come from coach time per patient, patient outcomes, and how patients rate the app. None of that was measurable yet when the first clinic went live. Next time I'd define the first metric alongside the first screen.