The Data Entrepreneurs Story — Part 2: Secondary Research on Hospital Pharmacy
“Research is to see what everybody else has seen, and to think what nobody else has thought.”
Albert Szent-Gyorgyi — Biochemist
Recap
Out of the 18 problems we gathered in Part 1, we decided to focus on the Drug Inventory Management problem as our area of focus, since it is a specific problem faced within the hospital sector across the world and it’s a pain that can also lead to fatal repercussion for patients.
Feedback
Upon presenting the progress and the problem we engaged in the inception face of our entrepreneurial journey from the first week, we did manage to get some valuable opinions from the instructor and our fellow batch-mates. Although most of their concern were rather not the problem nor the solution but the limited knowledge, we as Data Science students had about how hospitals and specifically of, how the pharmacy department works, which is quiet a fare point since neither one of us comes from any sort of medical background. As for our instructor’s advice, he wanted us to try an explain to him and the others how a hospital works and the dynamics of a pharmacy within a hospital in the following week. Besides those suggestion, the instructor was pleased on our knowledge about the actual problem and the results of our interviews with field experts and finally having a primitive solution to it too.
Drug Inventory Management
We will be concentrating on solving the following core problems that has been narrowed down to what pharmacists confronts when managing their drug inventories. The pains that the pharmacist we interviewed vent about in our interview where quite broad, yet with further research we did manage to derive at the following:
- Overstock & under-stock
- Forecasting from uncertainty
- Regulatory compliance
Research and Validation
In order to understand the underlying problem, we talked about in Part 1, it is evident that we had to start doing our secondary research — refer to external sources & existing research done in the field of Hospital Pharmacies, Drug Inventory Management etc. We realized in order to arrive at a feasible solution to the problems we have narrowed down, we not only have to focus on the problem like ignorant engineers but also understand the larger picture and its nitty-gritty details of the activities carried out in a Hospital Pharmacy in the Netherlands and universally to come up with much sophisticated solutions to a problem and also narrow down the problem to its root cause. We had a general idea of how the pharmacy department works based on the interview conducted on a pharmacist, yet to focus more on the Dutch market we referred to a series of journals, articles and existing research to identify the people involved and how drug inventory is managed currently and referred to some Regulatory compliance that are practices in the Netherlands, such as the Rational Pharmacotherapy (RP), which is a pharmacotherapy practice that ensures providing the right medicine to the right patient while adhering to quality, economical, effective standards. (Sosiaali- ja terveysministeriö, 2016) Other area or research carried out in the field of Drug Procurement, Pharmacy revenue cycles and Inventory management (Whitepaper by Deloitte).
Secondary research also helped us validate some of the gaps that are faced within our focus area, motivating us to pursue further into the solution, yet we need to validate our findings with experts in the industry, after all they are the people tackling the crisis and eventually be the users of our solution. How we plan to do this is through semi-structured interviews.
In the meantime, we have reached out to representatives in some hospitals in the Netherlands to interview them soon in the hopes of gathering more information on the problem and validation. This process is time consuming since most of these representatives aren’t as responsive.
Semi-structured interview protocol
We have reached out to representatives in some hospitals in the Netherlands and waiting for more points-of-contact to interview Hospital pharmacists in the hopes of gathering more information on the problem and validating if the problem exist as hypothesized from doing further research. Once the times have been agreed to in the near future, we are expecting to conduct the interviews with problem specific questions in drug inventory management. Some of the main questions would be:
- How is the pharmacy department structured in this hospital: the job roles and their respective responsibilities?
- What is the replenishment/restock process?
- Which important regulations concern the drugs inventory management in the Netherlands?
- Do you all use any forecasting techniques, if so what are some of the methods currently used?
- What are the processes of a drugs supply-chain in the Netherlands?
What have we learned this week?
This week was dedicated mainly to carry out secondary research and learn about how a hospital pharmacy work and understand the processes, people, laws and standards involved by referring to published articles, whitepapers, journals and websites. We did manage to learn how hospitals and pharmacies operate in the Netherlands and managed to identify the gaps they could be tackling as hypothesized previously. Something we realized is although this phase is crucial in an entrepreneurial venture, it only helped us see the problems that hospital pharmacists could be or have faced but we cannot be certain that they do so now or rather if they are significant problems to them. Which enlightened us that validation of the problem by the people involved, should be the next major step that we take.
Next steps
- Conduct interviews with field experts
- Validate our assumptions
- Pitch our idea and solution
About Us
Hi! This post is made possible in collaboration by Hameez Ariz, Yosef Winatmoko and Nemania Borovits. We are master students of Jheronimus Academy of Data Science (JADS) in the Netherlands, currently taking Data Entrepreneurship in Action III course. In the following weeks, we plan to continuously publish a weekly journal of our entrepreneurial journey. We hope you get inspired or learn from our mistakes and successes.
