I'm Kevin Vertucio. I started in 2006 on a hepatitis B antiviral and never left: patient apps, the tablet tools reps carry into a doctor's office, and the HCP email nobody opens unless you give them a reason to. Almost none of it wins awards. It passes review and it gets used, which in this industry is the harder trick.
What I do
Patients, reps, and prescribers usually get designed for by three separate teams who share a brand book and not much else. I've worked all three sides. Mostly that's useful for catching the places where they quietly contradict each other.
Onboarding, copay and access flows, symptom trackers, adherence programs, and portals designed for people who are anxious, distracted, or unwell — not for a demo. Plain-language content, low reading level, screen-reader tested.
Rep-facing tools built for a seven-minute detail: CLM and IVA decks, territory and call-planning apps, sample and signature capture, next-best-action prompts. Designed around what a rep can actually do standing in a hallway.
Non-personal promotion that respects a clinician's time: HCP portals, email and rep-triggered programs, congress and speaker experiences, ISI and fair-balance patterns that stay compliant without burying the message.
Therapeutic areas: oncology, cardiology, immunology, diabetes, mental health, and weight loss.
How I work
I've watched a three-week design become a four-month one because nobody asked legal a question in week one. So now I get MLR looking at wireframes and raw copy before anything is designed. It's a less satisfying way to work and it finishes faster.
01
Ride-alongs with reps, interviews with patients and caregivers, HCP advisory input. What the deck says the journey is, versus what it is.
02
Indication, label, ISI, PI, privacy, channel rules, platform limits. All of it written down before the first screen, so we argue about it while arguing is still cheap.
03
Clickable flows tested with the actual audience — including assistive technology — and documented so findings hold up to scrutiny.
04
Component library, accessible patterns, annotated specs, and content rules the agency or internal team can run with after I'm gone.
Capabilities
What I don't do: branding. No identity systems, no logos, no brand books. Other people are better at it than I am, and I'd rather hand you a name than pretend otherwise.
Tell me what you're building and what's in the way. Half an hour is usually enough for me to say whether it's a design problem or something design won't fix. I'll tell you if it's the second one.
Remote-first · Available for contract and fractional engagements
Questions
The same questions come up on almost every intro call, so here are the answers up front.
Same craft, harder constraints. Healthcare work carries regulated claims, mandatory safety information, privacy rules, and users who are sick, rushed, or legally accountable for what they decide. A consumer app can iterate its way to an answer over a few releases. Here you get fewer swings at it, and a bad screen costs more than a lost conversion.
MLR stands for medical, legal, and regulatory review, the committee that approves every promotional asset a pharmaceutical company publishes. It changes design because claims, imagery, and safety information cannot be altered late without restarting review. I bring the constraint in at wireframe stage, so reviewers respond to structure and copy before visual design is built, which cuts the number of rounds instead of multiplying them.
Health care professionals arrive with expertise and almost no time, so they need dense, scannable evidence and fast paths to data, dosing, and access. Patients arrive with anxiety and variable health literacy, so they need plain language, one decision per screen, and clear next steps. It's the same brand and the same science, but ship one information architecture for both and one of those audiences is getting a worse product.
CLM, or closed loop marketing, is the approved interactive presentation a pharmaceutical sales representative shows a physician, usually on a tablet in Veeva. It needs different design because the real call is short and interrupted, often standing in a hallway. Reps need to jump straight to the slide that answers the question in front of them, not walk a linear deck from slide one.
In practice, yes. Courts have applied the Americans with Disabilities Act to commercial websites, Section 508 governs federal and federally funded systems, and Section 1557 of the Affordable Care Act covers many health programs. WCAG 2.2 Level AA is the standard regulators and plaintiffs reference. For a patient population that skews older and more disabled than average, it is also just accurate design. This is general information, not legal advice.
By designing the study so protected health information never needs to be collected. Recruit through screeners that avoid identifiers, consent participants explicitly, keep recordings and notes de-identified, store them under the client's data agreements, and route any adverse event a participant mentions to the sponsor's pharmacovigilance process. Research that respects those rules is still deep research, it just gets planned earlier.
GEO stands for generative engine optimization: structuring content so AI assistants and answer engines can find, quote, and attribute it correctly. It matters in healthcare because patients and clinicians increasingly ask an AI assistant before they visit a website. If your approved, accurate content is not structured for citation, the answer gets assembled from sources you do not control.
Contract and fractional work: UX audits with a prioritized fix list, discovery and research studies, embedded product design on an existing team, and design system builds. Some of it is a couple of weeks, some of it runs for quarters. Either way it starts with a 30-minute call to work out what the actual problem is, and you get a written proposal with timeline and cost before I start.
Still have a question? Book a 30-minute call and ask it there.