It's important to understand all of the different stakeholders along a cycle of care because
you need to understand as you move forward from a needs assessment into a solution how
those stakeholders are going to be affected by what you decide to do.
Not every stakeholder is going to have a positive outcome from the type of innovation you bring.
You could be disrupting an entire cycle of care or you could be just trying to smooth
the process the patient takes through it.
Those are really important to understand because they affect how you, in the end, make decisions
about whether a need is something that's important to pursue and then later as you are looking
for solutions, what your solution is going to do and how much of a commercial investment
you'll need to make to bring that forward.
Let me tell you about some of the things I'm trying to uncover when I am talking to stakeholders
all along a cycle of care.
First, I'm trying to figure out how satisfied they are with their current solutions for
the patient and disease state that I'm interested in.
What are the parts of their equipment and the process that they like, and what do they
not like?
What are their frustrations and challenges?
What are the parts that they get the most joy out of?
I'm also trying to get an understanding of what does a new innovation need to bring from
a clinical value perspective, from a workflow perspective, from a payment perspective, that
makes it compelling or exciting enough for these surgeon or the physician to make a change?
There needs to be something there that will drive them to the purchase.
The same thing goes for the patient themselves.
Are we providing something, or if you solve the need will you be providing something that's
compelling to the patient?
Again, does it cost less for them?
Does it keep them at work longer, allow them to return to work faster, ease their ability
to treat the disease themselves?
What is it that you bring to the table that is going to convince them to choose your innovation
over the standard of care?
One more thing you should be looking for as you do a cycle of care analysis are trends.
How are the current trends within healthcare affecting the cycle of care, this disease
state?
Let me give you an example.
Within the field of ENT, there is an increasing trend towards doing procedures on awake patients
in the office setting.
This is – because this is easier and lower-impact on the patient, it shortens their recovery
times, and it also is reducing the burdens on hospitals and surgery centers for operating
room time.
What it is, is actually a return to the way ENT was done 50-to-100 years ago when most
procedures were done on patients awake in the clinic.
So, you are beginning to see this strong trend within ENT to that setting, and so looking
for innovation that is in line with that trend is a way to help move adoption forward.
As you're taking the results of your cycle of care analysis forward into needs filtering
and needs spec development, one of the things I've found from cycle of care analysis that
can help is to use that to understand how much commercialization you're likely to have
to do down the line.
The more elements of a cycle of care analysis that you have to change, or you're bringing
in something that will change, the more work you're going to have to do when you bring
it forward – either from a sales and marketing perspective, from a reimbursement perspective,
from an adoption perspective.
So, as you think about filtering your needs you need to think about how disruptive they
are to the current cycle of care.