Healthcare design carries constraints most other categories don't have to think about — patient data handling, accessibility requirements that aren't optional, and a review process that can involve clinical staff, legal teams, and sometimes the FDA before anything ships. The five companies below have real, verifiable healthcare work behind them, not just the category listed on a services page.
Products with FDA clearance, clinical trials or protected patient data.
Buyers with layered procurement and clinical sign-off.
Mission-driven health products without multi-department clinical review.
Wellness and health-tech products with modest compliance stakes.
Guidea has worked exclusively in healthcare for two decades, and its client portfolio reflects a depth few generalist studios can match — dozens of live products, clinical trials, and FDA clearances built for major health, pharma, and enterprise brands. The studio's process treats regulatory review as a built-in step from the earliest research phase, not a checkpoint bolted onto a standard product timeline near the end.
Healthcare onlyFDAPharma
Fuselab Creative holds a GSA federal contract specifically because so much of its healthcare work involves government and quasi-government buyers — a multi-year data visualization contract with a state health agency, clinical decision-support dashboards, and work with regional health information exchanges. That procurement credential alone changes the buying process for a public-sector healthcare client, not just the design work itself.
HealthcareGovernmentGSA contract
Sidebench's healthcare roster runs from a children's hospital to a university clinical innovation center to a national health nonprofit, the kind of client list that requires sign-off from people well outside a product team before anything launches. That range across institutional healthcare stakeholders is the studio's core differentiator within the category.
HospitalsNonprofitAcademic
Work & Co's work for Planned Parenthood required the same rigor the studio applies to major commercial clients like Apple, but aimed at a mission-driven healthcare access platform instead of a retail product — a reminder that healthcare design work spans far beyond hospital systems and pharma into reproductive health, nonprofit care access, and public health communication.
Care accessNonprofit
Clay Global doesn't run a dedicated healthcare practice, but its experience designing for other regulated, high-stakes categories — fintech and crypto brands where trust and data sensitivity are central to the design problem — translates directly to a health-tech client that wants a studio comfortable with regulatory weight without being narrowly boxed into healthcare alone.
FintechCryptoRegulated categories
Where each company is based, how it works, and what its named work in this industry covers.
| Company | Based in | Setup | Healthcare practice | Named healthcare work | GSA contract |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Guidea | Austin, TX | Office | Healthcare only, two decades | Clinical trials, FDA clearances | — |
| Fuselab Creative | McLean, VA | Office | Healthcare + government data | State health agency, clinical dashboards, HIEs | Yes |
| Sidebench | Santa Monica, CA | Office | Institutional healthcare + other sectors | Children's hospital, university clinical center, health nonprofit | — |
| Work & Co | Brooklyn, NY | Office | Part of a wider practice | Planned Parenthood | — |
| Clay Global | San Francisco, CA | Remote-first | No dedicated practice | — | — |
Ordered from healthcare only to healthcare-adjacent, using what each profile above says about the company’s focus.
5 US cities.
MapOne pin per head office
Guidea and Fuselab Creative both specialize narrowly and deeply — the former in healthcare exclusively for two decades, the latter in regulated data-dense interfaces across healthcare and government together. That depth shows up as faster judgment calls on compliance questions a generalist studio would need to research from scratch. Sidebench sits a step broader, comfortable across institutional healthcare and other regulated or high-profile sectors without losing healthcare-specific fluency.
Work & Co and Clay Global both bring healthcare-adjacent experience within a much wider practice — useful for a client that wants a studio with range beyond healthcare, as long as the specific compliance stakes of the project are modest enough not to require a dedicated specialist.
We built this list from public portfolios and named clients, and no company paid for its position.
It depends on regulatory exposure. A product involving FDA clearance, clinical trials, or protected patient data benefits from Guidea's or Fuselab's dedicated healthcare and compliance experience. A wellness app with no clinical or regulatory component has more flexibility across all five companies here.
Stakeholder complexity, mostly. A hospital system's procurement and clinical sign-off process, which Sidebench has direct experience navigating, tends to be more layered than a nonprofit's, which is closer to Work & Co's experience with Planned Parenthood — mission-driven, but without the same multi-department clinical review.
Mainly government and quasi-government buyers — state health agencies, federally funded health systems. A private hospital system or health-tech startup doesn't need a vendor with a GSA contract, though it's a useful signal of Fuselab's depth in regulated, high-stakes healthcare data work either way.
Sometimes, if the compliance stakes are low. Clay Global's experience in other regulated categories like fintech shows some of that judgment transfers. But for anything touching real clinical or patient-data risk, direct healthcare experience — like Guidea's or Fuselab's — reduces the chance of an expensive mistake discovered late in the process.