Team Blue At a Crossroad
This week our team broke our all-time interview record by interviewing 8 people including RNs, surgical residents, surgeons, and professors. We made such substantial progress in understanding surgeons’ unmet clinical needs that we needed to decide on the future direction to go.
Our team was initially assigned a project to potentially improve the handle of the electrocautery device ergonomically. As part of the Lean Launch Pad (LLP) learning method, we first needed to investigate and confirm customers’ needs by talking to different stakeholders, which was what my team was doing for the past three weeks. However, the more interviews we conducted, the more we realized that the ergonomic issue was probably not a “hair-on-fire” issue that could spin out a foreseeable business.
What we learned over the past interviews was that if one asks surgeons, or even surgical residents about the issues they encounter when using surgical devices, chances are they will have little to no complaint because they have already adapted to the instruments they used for years. As Dr. Schubl described, “surgeons are creatures of habits, just like every other human being” and “electrocautery handles haven’t changed for the past 50 years.” It was probably why most surgeons we interviewed reported no difficulty or awkwardness using electrocautery devices. It was also likely that surgical culture where a complaint isn’t encouraged plays a role.
Nevertheless, it doesn’t mean that current instruments cannot be further improved. Dr. Anderson mentioned that different sound tones that corresponded to different functions made it easier for surgeons to catch an error if they accidentally made one. The unintended current flow could be dangerous during cauterization, so we might want to enhance accuracy in cauterizing surfaces. Needs for different hand sizes for surgical tools certainly existed despite surgeons’ creativity in coming up with new ways to adjust their postures. Extended point of action (long rod), as well as limited degree of freedom created difficulties during laparoscopic operations. Current technologies such as robotic surgeries could address some of the issues that surgeons face in performing laparoscopic surgeries (extended point of action, the lack of degree of freedom, and ergonomics), yet some surgeons argue that they lose haptic tactile when using robots in robotic surgeries. The list of needs could go on and on as we conducted more and more interviews.
Our team has come a long way in needs finding related to electrocautery devices used in laparoscopic surgeries. Since ergonomics is no longer the urgent issue, the next questions to answer are: What is the urgent need? How do we approach and identify it? What can we design to address this urgent need? What innovative design can we come up with to address the pain points in surgical operation? Bottom lines are we don’t want to solve imaginary or non-significant problems. This following week our team will dedicate the time to decide on the future direction to go and we are sure whatever awaits us will be truly exciting!
