BY Maverick Allen
The iF Design Award, one of the most prestigious honors in the global design community, recently announced its 2025 winners. Among nearly 11,000 submissions from approximately 66 countries, HealthMate—an innovative AI-driven healthcare management application designed by Weichen Zhao—secured this highly coveted international recognition. The jury praised HealthMate for providing groundbreaking solutions to critical healthcare issues and delivering an exceptional user experience, underscoring Weichen Zhao and his team’s significant contribution and global influence in healthcare technology and design.
The creation of HealthMate stemmed from a profound understanding of persistent issues within the United States healthcare system. Patients and healthcare providers in the U.S. have long struggled with complex administrative procedures and a lack of transparency regarding medical costs. Patients frequently face the repetitive burden of filling out numerous paper forms during medical visits, while uncertainties surrounding medical expenses compound their anxiety. These challenges have significantly diminished the quality of patients’ healthcare experiences and placed considerable administrative pressure on healthcare institutions, reducing efficiency and service quality. Recognizing the limitations of existing systems, Weichen Zhao and his team developed HealthMate—a highly innovative healthcare management application combining AI technology with interaction design principles. The application aims to alleviate these systemic problems through digital innovation, facilitating a more efficient and transparent interaction between patients and healthcare providers.
As the designer of HealthMate, Weichen Zhao possesses a solid academic background and extensive industry experience in healthcare interaction design. He graduated from the California College of the Arts (CCA), majoring in Interaction Design. From his academic years onward, Weichen Zhao demonstrated keen insight into leveraging data analysis to enhance user experience and consistently explored interdisciplinary integration between technology and design. His subsequent professional experiences further enriched his understanding of user needs and ability to identify market challenges accurately. During his internships and collaborative roles at global tech corporations such as TikTok and Tencent, he actively participated in user research, data analysis, and UI/UX optimization projects, laying a solid foundation for his future design work. Currently serving as a Product Manager at Datalynn and a UI/UX Designer at Dot Point, Weichen Zhao continues to refine his skills by closely collaborating with cross-functional teams, effectively aligning design strategies with real-world user experiences and market demands.
Weichen Zhao
The innovative strength of HealthMate lies primarily in its unique and comprehensive functionality. Weichen Zhao and his team collaborated closely with senior medical experts and practitioners from the U.S. healthcare sector, thoroughly investigating user needs and creatively integrating artificial intelligence and data analytics into healthcare management. Utilizing advanced AI technology, HealthMate significantly simplifies patient information entry processes: patients enter their personal information only once, after which the application automatically populates forms required for future medical services. Furthermore, HealthMate accurately estimates medical expenses using sophisticated AI algorithms, transparently informing patients about insurance coverage and out-of-pocket costs, thereby eliminating uncertainties and anxieties related to healthcare expenditures.
Additionally, Weichen Zhao’s team innovatively designed a system for matching healthcare providers based on patient insurance networks. When scheduling medical services, patients enter their insurance details. HealthMate recommends appropriate medical institutions aligned with their insurance coverage, substantially reducing the time and effort required to locate suitable healthcare resources. Furthermore, HealthMate includes a 24-hour AI health assistant capable of promptly addressing patients’ health-related inquiries and daily healthcare concerns. This feature ensures real-time accessibility to medical advice, significantly enhancing patient satisfaction and healthcare experiences.
HealthMate
Healthcare providers also greatly benefit from HealthMate’s implementation. By streamlining administrative tasks, hospitals and clinics can shift focus away from burdensome paperwork and insurance processes, allowing medical personnel to concentrate more fully on patient care. Digitalized information collection and automated insurance matching significantly reduce manual workload and communication overhead, enhancing operational efficiency, decreasing patient waiting times, and improving satisfaction. HealthMate’s successful deployment demonstrates how digitalization and intelligent technologies can effectively advance healthcare systems, promising greater efficiency, intelligence, and human-centered care in the healthcare industry’s future.
Following its receipt of this internationally acclaimed award, HealthMate has rapidly attracted widespread attention from both within and beyond the industry. Numerous enterprises and research institutions have expressed significant interest in this innovative design, aiming to build upon Weichen Zhao’s work by conducting further in-depth research and collaboration to bring HealthMate’s benefits—convenience and efficiency—to more patients. Currently, teams from locations including Chicago in the United States and Shenzhen in China are already in discussions with the designer, actively exploring potential directions for future cooperation, intending to achieve broader application within the healthcare sector. This enthusiastic response strongly indicates that Weichen Zhao’s design not only possesses remarkable innovation and forward-thinking attributes but also demonstrates substantial potential for market application and social value.
As an innovative application gaining recognition on the international stage, HealthMate’s future development is highly anticipated. Weichen Zhao plans to further advance the application’s technical architecture by incorporating machine learning algorithms capable of deeper analysis of personal health data, thus providing personalized healthcare management services. He aims to integrate additional technological innovations and design strategies, broadening HealthMate’s applicability to more healthcare institutions and diverse populations. Future developments may also include integrating wearable devices and health-monitoring tools to offer real-time health data analysis and guidance, reinforcing HealthMate’s leading position in digital healthcare.
HealthMate
Winning the 2025 iF Design Award not only highlights Weichen Zhao’s profound expertise and innovative capabilities in interaction design and healthcare innovation but also establishes a new global standard for intelligent healthcare applications. HealthMate’s success underscores the transformative power of design innovation within the healthcare field and indicates the steady progression toward digitalization, intelligence, and a more patient-centered healthcare industry. This distinguished honor will undoubtedly inspire more designers to engage in healthcare innovation, propelling the entire industry toward higher standards of excellence.