Introducing Lean Design and Development to Accelerate a Hospital’s Innovation Efforts
Mad*Pow's Center for Health Experience Design collaborated closely with the Hospital team to envision modern mobile replacements for certain burdensome legacy systems. By leveraging techniques popularized by the Lean UX and Lean Start-up movements, the project team was able to rapidly cycle through multiple product definitions.
Boston Children’s is Harvard Medical Schools pediatric teaching hospital, rated as one of the best in the country. This 395-bed facility serves over 500,000 patients a year and it is constantly innovating to improve patient communication, education, and engagement to help drive improved health outcomes. Members of the Hospital’s physician-led Clinical Mobile Solutions formed the Hacking Pediatrics hackathon, and work closely with MIT’s H@cking Medicine group.
Project highlights
- Applying Lean methodologies to Hospital application development
- Rapid cycles of low-fidelity interactive prototypes to resolve the product definition
- Cutting-edge technology stack definition incorporating geofencing and iBeacon APIs.
Defining an opportunity
The hospital team has turned its attention to the every-day tools that enable medical staff to conduct their rounds and audit performance. Many of the day-to-day tools in use in hospitals across the country are legacy systems that are past their best and not in step with user expectations for always-on mobile-ready tools. The team calculated some of the possible efficiency gains that could be achieved by updating core systems to a modern standard – time saved that clinicians can use to better serve patients. MadPow helped make this opportunity tangible by constructing a study to analyze the behavior workflow and expectations of clinicians.
Sketching solutions
MadPow collaborated closely with the Hospital team to envision modern mobile replacements for certain burdensome legacy systems. By leveraging techniques popularized by the Lean UX and Lean Start-up movements, the project team were able to rapidly cycle through multiple product definitions. We progressed from sketches to lo-fidelity wireframes which we then tested with a remote unmoderated usability testing tool (solidifyapp.com), which gave the team a cheap and portable prototype they could use on real mobile devices with practicing physicians right in the context of use – the hospital ward. This helped the team narrow their product focus down to a meaningful Minimum Viable Product that would meet the core goals while being inexpensive to develop and scale.
Technology definition
The MadPow technology team worked with user experience and the client team to craft the technology requirements that could underpin a robust pilot program. They unpicked the pros, cons, and implications of different vendor APIs to find the right mix of technologies that would support the team’s vision.
