Untethered Healthcare

Design thinking is a term coined by Tim Brown of Ideo. It means integrating user-centered discovery and consideration in all phases of developing a product or service. Understanding what people like, want, use, hate and love about a product through direct observation and feeding that back through an iterative process that keeps the end-users day-to-day needs front and center is a powerful tool.  Focusing like a laser on the whole end-to-end user experience can even change the game — just look at Apple. Edison understood this too when he invented the electrical distribution industry after inventing the light bulb. But it is a relatively new phenomenon in healthcare.

I once spent six months on a worldwide Voice of the Customer research effort for a medical device company. One of the customer phrases that stuck in my head was “what does this button do?” It seemed a once-sentence, summary indictment of all of the overly complex user-interfaces adorning medical devices around the world. Another customer I interviewed, the head of pediatric intensive care at a large German hospital, told me the user interfaces to most of his devices were so complex, the annual training costs to keep people’s skills current made it unlikely he would seriously consider another vendor — even us. Talk about customer lock and high switching costs! He was so frustrated, he started consulting to medical device companies on user interface design.

Personally, I think the discipline of design thinking has a lot to offer healthcare. I’m even seeing the term “design” included in the name of what used to be thought of as pure engineering institutions, such as the Center for Bioengineering Innovation and Design at John’s Hopkins.  I had a great conversation recently with Aaron Blackledge, the founder of the fastest growing and highest rated walk-in medical practice in San Francisco. He got professional help applying design thinking to all aspects of his user experience, from the office layout to how users access services via the web. He asks constantly for feedback from his patients on how he can make things better for them. Not rocket science, but it is clearly setting him apart from the competition.

In the medical device space, lack of good user-centered design can impact patient safety. What do suppose a medical product line and the related training,  service and support would look like if it were designed from the ground up with goal of focusing like a laser on the entire user-experience?

Your thoughts?

Most companies are familier with Lean principles. Lean is about eliminating waste from any business process, usually manufacturing.  Institutionalizing the culture of holding regular kaizen events on the manufacturing floor to eliminate wasted time, effort and resources can achieve remarkable results in a very short time. However, the benefits may be harder to achieve or accept culturally when the process being optimized is less tangible and visible. Though the principles of using Lean across all phases of product development were well documented by Toyota, I’ve seen fewer companies, at least in the medical hardware and software/IT spaces,  adapting Lean to the front end of product development. It may be that someone’s idea of waste in these functional areas may be someone else’s primary responsibility. That doesn’t mean that Lean can’t be used to optimize these functions, but be prepared for some surprises as to how much waste you find.  I don’t mean don’t do it, though. My experience is that if engineers are aware up front that their jobs are safe, they will readily see the benefits of eliminating waste and being more productive, even if their roles or daily tasks change in the process. I suggest starting small with training in Value Stream Mapping and working up.

I’m curious to hear others experiences in bringing Lean methods into the front end of medical hardware or software product development. Your thoughts?