To prepare ourselves for observation as engineers, we had boot camp here, which had tons of clinical
lectures to prepare us for the kinds of things we would see. But I would say I did a lot
of reading online for different procedures. I think the lessons learned is you really
need to do your homework before you go into the observation phase. You can do a quick
search on YouTube to see how the operation is done, what kind of processes to have a
better understanding before you go into the OR so you can ask smarter questions … just
don’t be afraid of asking when you feel the moment is right. Most of the surgeons
are wonderful. They are really helpful answering your questions even though at the beginning
we ask a lot of stupid questions and it really did help us learning.
Our team had four people total. We have three engineers, two biomedical, one mechanical,
and then a clinician. When we went into needs finding, we usually did it in pairs in the
beginning, I think to kinda get ourselves used to it and it was also helpful to be with
the clinician because he could explain a lot of things. But then once we got comfortable,
we often did it alone, because sometimes it’s easier and more comfortable for the patient
and the physician that you’re shadowing to just be one person rather than this army
of people watching them do their work. what really helped to me in the observation
part was to write everything down on a notebook irrespective of whether it’s actually going
to be into a need or not because at that point in time if you start thinking about those
things, you might actually miss a lot of stuff that’s happening around. So whatever you
see, hear, feel, whatever you sense just write it down in a piece of notebook. Come back,
think why does that happen that way It’s always good to draw besides that on your notebook
what you're seeing because sometimes you need to get back what was there, what was not there.
For observation capturing, we used just notebook. It’s much easier to scribble something really
quickly while someone’s talking in the clinic there, but then we all transferred them to
more electronic form. We used spreadsheets and a Google Spreadsheet was actually really
helpful, because then we could all update it at the same time. We used a format of problem
or observation and then the need, we’d write about it and then we left space also for the
different filtering categories we were going to use.
one of the things they told us is that go for quantity over quality and I definitely
think that that is true because, even if you think something is dumb or not that significant
in observation, you should write it down because later, you
might be able to pivot from it to another need. I think there’s a few times we came
up with one need that sounded sort of not that interesting, but once we sort of looked
at the root of the problem or thought about different aspects of that problem, we came
up with a really great need. In the beginning as a newbie to this process,
you write down everything and anything. I think as needs finding goes on, you start
to really hone in on what ‘s a good need. At the beginning, I would write down 50 problems
a day, but after a week, I was writing down only 4 or 5 good problems that I saw.
We met probably every other day in the afternoon after doing needs finding in the morning and
we each would put our findings into a table format and then discuss them as a group. sometimes
you would see repeat observations, so then you could either add to it and say, “Here’s
another problem I found with that same procedure” or you could say, “Okay , we’ve covered
that one” so it’s helpful to understand also the frequency of how often some of these
things happen.