… for needs finding you first go into an observational phase where you clear your mind
of all prejudices, go out there, see how care is provided…
… That’s the first step.
You go back home, look at your observations, which are basically just literally, I saw
this doctor do this, this doctor do that and then that was done.
I tried to extract why was it being done that way?
Could it be done better?
Is there some obvious problem or were the people fretting about something, is that..
pinpoints being identified?
That’s the next step; you extract your needs from that observation …
… we were taught in class to basically have the three components and the need statement
and basically follow that way how to do it having a way to do something better with an
outcome and a patient population.
So having that framework just made it much easier
… in a needs statement, you have your problem, you have your population, and you have your
outcome.
Usually the problem is fairly clear.
That usually is settled pretty early.
It’s the population and most of times the outcome because a lot of the times you will
not see a negative outcome in the observations.
You sometimes have to intuit that and sometimes you have to verify with the doctors that,
you know… you were doing it like this, what would happen if you don’t do it like this?
and that’s something which is very tough, the outcome part.
I think regarding the problems sometimes we are not sure.
Some people think, for example, confusion is a state of mind, which I may think that
I saw someone was confused.
You may think that they were not confused, and when you go and ask them, they would definitely
say, “We were not confused.
We are so proficient at it.”
So these kind of things which you have to judge and you have to make a call sometimes
make it a little difficult.
The fact that you have a limited number of observations also stresses you on the front
that maybe it’s just a one-time thing that you saw and it’s not a continuing problem
that’s going to happen.
What we did is, we all sat together and thought of the problem, as such, and formed a sentence
and it took almost three to four sessions to get the exact statement, which fits the
exact observation, as such, because most of the statements we came up, we realized that
it doesn’t have the most important parts, like what exactly are you trying to solve
and who is gonna benefit.
This was something which requires a bit of experience.
The only challenge would be if what we all, if multiple people saw one observation, or
one of kinf of procedure and multiple observations within a procedure and what was the most important
thing, what did we want to capture in the needs statement.
Those took the longest to get through.
I wouldn’t say there was conflict, there was a lot of work to, we would put all of
them up on the whiteboard and then try to figure out what was the most important piece
of all of that and then write, sometimes we wrote five needs statements for it and sometimes
we got down to just one.
That was a little bit of an art and not a science and a little challenging.
The way we saw the observations was different.
My friend was an engineer.
He saw it in a different viewpoint.
Whereas for me, as a doctor, I know that these are the restrictions.
My observations were completely different.
Basically, you try not to include solutions in the needs statements.
So this has sometimes become really tricky to – how to identify a problem without thinking
of a solution.
I think that when you’re an innovator, you automatically try to come up with a million
solutions but the process of biodesign teaches that first, you have to focus on a really
good need statement and go from there.
The process of converting observations into needs was probably a little challenging at
first, but after you do a couple days of it, it becomes like you just speak in these statements.