Allergies never hide behind a "+2".
What a one-hour design review of an IVF clinic platform taught me about safety-critical screens.
We were reviewing a patient card. The allergy field used a pill selector, the same component we use for tags everywhere. When a patient had more allergies than the row could fit, it showed the first two and a small "+2".
It looked clean. It was also the most dangerous pixel on the screen.
A "+2" means a nurse has to click to know if the patient reacts to a drug. On a busy morning, nobody clicks. So we changed the rule, and we wrote it down as a developer requirement instead of a design note: the allergy field grows to show every allergy. No overflow, no counter, no click.
That one decision opened the rest of the review.
Density is not the enemy. Hiding is.
The anesthesia record had a vitals table that felt cramped. The first instinct was to shrink things. Instead we gave the table more width and moved the slower content (pre-op notes, discharge criteria) to the side. A procedure usually lasts under fifteen minutes, so the table only needs two or three readings, but those readings need to be readable at a glance.
The post-op log went the other way. Previous assessments were taking half the drawer, so we condensed each one to two lines: time and vitals on the first, comments below. Same information, less scrolling. The save button stays fixed in the drawer footer, so it never depends on how many entries exist.
Remove what the screen already says
The anesthesia plan asked for the procedure. The procedure was already at the top of the screen. A repeated field is not harmless: it is one more place where two values can disagree. We removed it. Same with the patient name on the stim sheet.
Templates beat blank boxes
Discharge instructions were a free text area. We are adding four template pills next to the label, one per procedure type, with the text below. The clinician starts from the right text and edits, instead of typing the same paragraph for the hundredth time.
What I keep from it
In clinical software, I ask one question of every component we reuse: what happens when it hides something? For tags, nothing. For allergies, a person can get hurt. The component is the same. The rule cannot be.