Hospital Sírio-Libanês is one of Brazil's most respected philanthropic medical institutions — a reference in high-complexity care serving over 150,000 patients per year from its flagship campus in São Paulo, with a network extending across the country and internationally.
Despite the quality of clinical care, every patient interaction still ran on manual, paper-based processes. Registration required a physical desk. Queues offered no visibility. Meal orders were paper forms. Exam results were scattered across disconnected systems. For someone already in a vulnerable moment, each friction point compounded the next.
A single patient hub giving people control over their entire care journey — from booking and pre-arrival to inpatient meals, exam results and long-term health management. Not a service portal. A bridge.
Tornar as pessoas protagonistas da sua própria saúde.
The product mission guiding every decision — not software layered onto administrative processes, but a tool that hands patients genuine agency over their own health.
A point of welcome.
A bridge for lasting relationships.
The app had to feel like the hospital extending genuine care into the patient's daily life — not an administrative interface dressed in brand colours.
That meant plain language over clinical jargon, predictability over ambiguity, and navigation centred on patient tasks rather than internal org charts. Each feature was measured not only by task completion, but by whether it reduced anxiety and built trust over time.
↓ 30% in reception
waiting time.
Patients complete their arrival registration from home, receive a queue token on their phone and track their status in real time. When they walk into the hospital, check-in takes seconds — no forms, no repeated questions, no waiting in a line.
The outcome: over 600 additional monthly appointments absorbed without increasing front-desk load, and a first touchpoint that calms rather than compounds the anxiety of arriving at a hospital.
Nutritionist-designed meals,
chosen by the patient.
For inpatients entitled to hospital meals, the app surfaces a menu curated by nutritionists and tailored to each patient's care plan. Selections and adjustments happen directly in the app — no paper forms, no waiting for a staff member to relay the order.
Having control over what you eat while hospitalised is a small autonomy with an outsized effect. It signals something essential: you are a person here, not a case number.
Tempo —
the component library built for HSL.
A shared token-based system covering typography, colour, spacing and the full component set used across all patient-facing surfaces — built in parallel with the product to keep design and engineering in sync.
500,000+ lives managed
through a single platform.
The platform expanded to corporate health partnerships — organisations whose employee benefit plans run through HSL, covering hundreds of thousands of managed lives. Digital and hybrid care models, all accessible through the same app patients already knew.
Delivered in approximately three months. The architecture was already in place; what changed was the scale of the audience it could serve.
/ 01
Calm is a design decision.
Hospitals are already high-anxiety environments. Every interaction we removed — a form field, a queue line, an ambiguous status message — reduced cognitive load at exactly the moment patients could least afford to spend it. Friction is never neutral in healthcare.
/ 02
A design system is a trust infrastructure.
Building Tempo in parallel with the product meant engineers could ship new surfaces without waiting for design review on every component. The real value wasn't consistency — it was speed without regression. The system paid for itself within the first feature expansion.
/ 03
Staff are users too.
The biggest improvements to the check-in flow came from shadowing reception staff, not from patient interviews. They absorbed the cost of every UX gap. Designing for the person behind the desk changed what we prioritised on the screen in front of the patient.
/ 04
Architecture unlocks scale.
Expanding to 500k corporate lives in three months was only possible because the underlying design and engineering architecture was built to be extended — not rebuilt. The decision to invest in modularity early wasn't obvious when the first user was a single inpatient.