Innovation in medical devices is crucial for the health and well-being of everyone and it’s made even more fundamental, because medical devices are becoming a part of our everyday lives, whether to monitor, diagnose, or predict the likelihood of a disease or illness, or prevent it through healthy habits.
Investment in an medical product could mean design and development of a medical device and long term commitments in R&D, design , operations, marketing and sales for selling and sustaining the medical device. Therefore it becomes very important to invest in the ideas that have greater chances to be profitable.
Among the several approaches to innovation, Design Thinking is the one which is focused on developing and understanding the people for whom the products are being designed, identify the gaps and needs of users in depth and prototype ideas in an iterative manner until the end user is satisfied with the product. That’s why design thinking has been increasingly adopted as an approach to support innovation in healthcare and other industries.
Below is a true story on how Design Thinking approach made a difference in spite of an innovative product developed by manufacturer.
A Story on how Design Thinking made a difference
A medical devices veteran, Doug helps lead the design and development of high-tech medical imaging system. His MRI System get insights into the human body in ways that would have been considered magic just a generation ago.
When he got the opportunity to see it installed in a hospital, he jumped at the opportunity. Standing next to his new machine Doug talked to doctors that the MRI scanner had been submitted for an International Design Excellence Award.
Doug was prepared to come away patting himself on the back for a job well done. But then the technician asked him to step out into the hall for a moment because a patient needed to get a scan. When he did, he saw a young girl walking toward him, tightly holding her parents’ hands. The parents looked worried, and their young daughter was clearly scared, all in anticipation of what lay ahead—MRI machine.
As Doug watched, the little girl’s tears rolled down her cheeks. To Doug’s surprise, the technician picked up the phone to call for an anesthesiologist. And that was when Doug learned that hospitals routinely sedate pediatric patients for their scans because they are so scared that they can’t lie still long enough. As many as 80 percent of pediatric patients have to be sedated.
From Observing to Empathizing
When Doug witnessed the anxiety and fear his machine caused among the most vulnerable patients, the experience triggered a crisis for him that forever changed his perspective. Rather than an elegant, sleek piece of technology, worthy of accolades and admiration, he now saw that—through the eyes of a young child—the MRI looked more like a big scary machine you have to go inside. Pride in his design was replaced with feelings of failure for letting down the very patients he was trying to help.
The Journey Toward Change
So Doug sought advice on this personal and professional challenge from friends and colleagues. His seniors suggested he can try out Design Thinking and human centered design. Searching for a fresh perspective and a different approach to his work, Doug attended weeklong workshop on Design Thinking.
The workshop offered Doug new tools that ignited his creative confidence: He learned about a human-centered approach to design and innovation. He observed and talked to users to better understand consumer needs.
By applying this approach on his own work, Doug believed he could come up with a better solution for children.
Without significant resources, funding, Doug knew he couldn’t launch a big R&D project to redesign an MRI machine from scratch. So he focused on redesigning the experience.
He started by observing and gaining empathy for young children at a daycare center. He talked to child specialists to understand what pediatric patients went through. Next, he created his prototype which was a pirate ship worthy of an amusement park ride. The operator tells kids that they will be sailing inside the pirate ship and they have to stay completely still while on the boat.
After their “voyage,” they get to pick a small treasure from the pirate’s chest on the other side of the room. This reframing transforms a normally terrifying “BOOMBOOM-BOOM” sound into just another part of the adventure.
Outcome
With Doug’s new MRI redesign for kids, the number of pediatric patients needing to be sedated was reduced dramatically. The hospital benefited because less need for anesthesiologists meant more patients could get scanned each day. Meanwhile, patient satisfaction scores went up 90 percent. An MRI transformed into a pirate adventure for pediatric patients.
This story illustrates how design thinking and human-centered design can lead to breakthrough innovations and help us better serve the people we are creating for. New opportunities for innovation open up when you start the creative problem-solving process with empathy toward your target audience—whether it’s kids, clients or customers.
What is Design Thinking
As we understood from the above example the Design Thinking is a method of problem-solving that focuses on human behavior and needs. The essence of design thinking is human-centric and user-specific.
Design thinking is a truly human-centered way to understand the lives and challenges of end users in order to identify needs and put in solutions. It is a process for solving problems by prioritizing the consumer’s needs above all else. It relies on observing, with empathy, how people interact with their environments, and employs an iterative, hands-on approach to creating innovative solutions.
How Design Thinking process work?
There are 5 distinct phases in the design thinking process for medical product innovation. We will go into details of each in a separate article but I will try to explain briefly about each of those phases here:
EMPATHIZE: Work to fully understand the experience of the user which will come in contact with the product in some way or the other. These users will include Caregivers (surgeon, intensivist, nurses, ward boys etc.) , dealers, patients etc. Do this through observation, interaction, and immersing yourself in their experiences.
This phase of the design process involves the study of the actual user demographic to gain meaningful insights into their behavior. User research techniques include contextual inquiries, user interviews, surveys and questionnaires, observational studies, etc., which do the job of mapping the user journey from the point of origin to the destination – and thereby covering their pain points at various stages
DEFINE: Process and synthesis the findings to form a user point of view that you will address with your design. The synthesis part of the process is where the collected data is analyzed and made sense of. Conducted in succession, these methods manage to give a voice to the patients, caregivers, as well as stakeholders, letting all three sides weigh their opinions regarding the entire system and be heard.
IDEATE: Explore a wide variety of possible solutions through generating a large quantity of diverse possible solutions, allowing you to step beyond the obvious and explore a range of ideas. Creating a phase of design thinking which is an iterative process of finding creative solutions – is what helps keep up with this frenetic pace of progress.
The ideation techniques in the design process involve brainstorming wherein designers, based on the research data, come up with feasible and creative solutions to solve problems in an efficient, budget-friendly manner.
PROTOTYPE: The above ideas are turned into simple prototypes, which may be used in user testing to ensure that the solution is headed in the right direction. Based on the feedback gained in the user testing phase, the prototypes are further refined before being moved to design. By Transforming the ideas into a physical form you can experience and interact with them and, in the process, learn and develop more empathy.
TEST: Try out and use observations and feedback to refine prototypes, learn more about the user, and refine your original point of view. Testing the product with the end user and getting feedback is essential to improve the product based on feedback from the end user.
Thus, in the further stages of design when the actual solution building happens based on user experience, it ends up being high on utility, practicality, and financial feasibility, solely because it is not sourced through thin air and is instead focused on solving real-world user problems in real-time.
There are 2 other aspects to consider in the application of design thinking for innovation :
Business viability: Without considering the business aspect of the healthcare innovation, it will not find the way toward market or hospital adoption.
Technological feasibility: The central concept is that health solutions should be applicable from the technical and engineering perspective. The application extends to integrating the health technology into current hospital systems and setup.