Transforming e-commerce for a global medical supply and solutions leader
Services:
Product design
Brand identity design
Product & content strategy
Experience & personalization strategy
Concept validation testing
User research
Measurement strategy
Physicians and dentists are trained to cure disease, restore health, and treat pain. But what do they actually spend their days doing? Updating records. Chasing authorizations. Filling out forms. Administrative friction steals 1.1 billion hours of patient care from U.S. physicians every year.
Henry Schein supports more than one million healthcare customers globally, providing over 300,000 products across medical, dental, and institutional care. But their legacy e-commerce platform had become part of the problem. Slow, fragmented, and built for a different era, it forced clinicians to navigate unnecessary complexity just to order the supplies they needed to do their jobs.
The business knew friction in the supply chain was creating friction in care. They needed a partner who could treat time as a core value, not just a metric. Code and Theory was brought in to rebuild one of the world's most complex B2B e-commerce ecosystems from the ground up, designing every interaction around a single question: how do we give healthcare professionals more time to care for patients?
Impact
- 46% reduction in touchpoints to purchase
- 23% increase in revenue per visit
- 79% increase in individual spend
- 18% decrease in bounce rates
Key Takeaways
- By treating time as the ultimate currency, we reframed e-commerce optimization as a patient care initiative, aligning business metrics with healthcare outcomes.
- A modular, role-aware platform now serves clinicians, office managers, and institutions with tailored experiences while scaling consistently across 50+ global markets.
- The transformation unified experience, technology, and operations teams around shared foundations, turning digital commerce into a strategic capability rather than a transactional channel.
Designed for urgency, built for scale
Understanding who's buying and why
A single experience was trying to serve everyone and serving no one effectively. Clinicians needed speed and confidence. Office managers needed control and visibility. Large institutions required consistency and oversight across dozens of locations. Each role shares urgency but differs in authority, context, and decision-making.
We rebuilt the platform around real roles, not generic user journeys. Clinicians can now reorder trusted supplies in seconds. Office managers have clear visibility into budgets, approvals, and purchasing history. Institutions benefit from standardized workflows that maintain oversight without adding drag.
Removing the right friction
Fewer steps isn't always better
In healthcare purchasing, accuracy and trust are non-negotiable. The goal wasn't simply to reduce clicks; it was to remove the steps that didn't earn their place in the journey while preserving the precision that regulated environments demand.
We simplified navigation, product discovery, and checkout flows by pressure-testing every interaction against a single criterion: does this help someone get back to their patients faster? The result cut touchpoints to purchase nearly in half while maintaining the compliance and reliability healthcare professionals depend on.
A system that compounds
One platform, 50+ markets
Henry Schein operates across more than 50 markets with sub-brands like Kent Express, each with unique regulatory requirements and customer expectations. Previously, improvements had to be rebuilt market by market, limiting speed and creating inconsistency.
The new modular architecture allows enhancements to be built once and deployed globally. A shared design system ensures visual and functional consistency while accommodating regional needs. This means every optimization now benefits the entire network, and the platform gets smarter and faster with each iteration.
From channel to capability
Changing how teams work together
The transformation didn't just change the product; it changed how Henry Schein operates. Experience, e-commerce, technology, data, and regional teams that once worked in parallel now collaborate from shared foundations, metrics, and objectives.
Digital commerce is no longer treated as a transactional channel. It's a strategic capability that supports care delivery. Teams plan, design, and optimize together, using shared performance indicators to guide decisions. The shift reduced duplication, accelerated delivery, and created an operating model capable of responding to urgent, real-world healthcare needs.
The metric that matters
Every second saved helps patients get care
The numbers tell one story: higher engagement, increased spend, reduced friction. But the real impact is harder to quantify. Every unnecessary click we eliminated, every confusing workflow we untangled, every second we shaved from the ordering process represents time returned to people who never have enough of it.
We didn't fix healthcare. But we helped give time back to those who will.