The Data Entrepreneurs Story — Part 5: Solution formulation

“Innovation is the outcome of a habit, not a random act.” ~Sukant Ratnakar

A new way of solving a old bad habit efficiently. Source

As you would have read our entrepreneurial journey for the past few weeks, we are starting to see the light at the end of the ‘problem’ tunnel get closer. As a group of engineering entrepreneurs, we are all about solving problems, but in this case we forced ourselves to follow to do more than just engineering stuff, but also embrace the entrepreneurial viewpoint. After all, that’s the point of this whole course.

Going forward, we managed to ascertain the final problem that we are going to solve by carrying out rigorous interviews with the problem owners, which you could read about in Part 04 . Now we focus our attention to solving the problem of manual drug inventory check by staff in hospitals. We had a few ideas of how to deal with this problem off the top of our heads, but we decided to keep it entrepreneurial and focus on a unique value proposition for the solution that captures the value we are to offer to our customers.

Unique Value Proposition (UVP)

“A clear statement that describes the benefit of your offer, how you solve your customer’s needs and what distinguishes you from the competition.” (Unbounce, 2019)

Our UVP: Real-time drugs stock monitoring as simple as ABC.

Mary uses the cool app in her phone to log the two pills of Allegra she took last night using a voice command.

Basically a tool that monitors unrecorded drug withdrawals from the inventory, with accountability but minimal effort.

Real-time drug inventory monitoring

As stated in the UVP, the solution we cooked up is to monitor the available drugs in the shelf accurately, with very little effort by the staff. As discussed previously, nurses tend to take drugs off the pharmacy inventory in case of an emergency and does not usually log the withdrawal, which usually leads to a discrepancy of stock quantity in the system and what’s actually in the inventory. So, our solution is to develop a tool that the relevant personals who withdraw drugs straight from the inventory in case of emergency, could use to log it immediately without having to go through a series of steps, that is too many when life is on the line, but mechanism that is efficient to use and is as easy as saying A B C..

Literally how nurses take drugs off the inventory, but they don’t steal it like this Seagull. Source

What we have in mind is an application that takes in voice commands to log the drug that gets withdrawn from the inventory, and the data will be updated to a dashboard real-time. This will help the pharmacists to have an accurate value of the drugs in the shelves of the inventory, unlike the discrepant values they have in the system as of now. We believe that this will also help reduce the frequency or even overcome manual drug check completely if the proposed tool is used.

Solution assumptions

We came up with this solution idea having some preconceived assumptions of the end-user as follows:

1. The pharmacists are willing to pay for a real-time drug monitoring
2. If there is a simpler way to report drug withdrawal, the personnel will use it

Based on the interviews we conducted, we feel that these assumptions are quite valid because pharmacists mentioned manual drug check frequently, so it is fair to assume that it is a possible pain, but not stated explicitly. In order to proceed with a prototype we are planning on validating it with the problem holder.

Next Steps

In the upcoming days our goal is to validate the assumptions we made of the solution and start designing the prototype. In order to do this we have arranged a meeting with a Head Pharmacist in the Netherlands. We are also planning on getting some insight regarding the proposed solution and what he thinks of it as assurance before we go ahead with the solution prototype.

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. If you have not read our journey so far, please check it out.

Part 1 — Finding a case

Part 2 — Secondary research on hospital pharmacy

Part 3 — The problem is out there

Part 4 — Connecting the dots