Sprint Two: Diving into the Problem Space
Before we get started, here is a little recap from the last post about our project:
our MHCI Capstone team aims to gain a deeper understanding of the various factors contributing to physician burnout — with a focus on millennials — and the constraints imposed by EHR and other digital healthcare systems.
Our first sprint ended with project planning, background research, and lots of preparations for our client kick-off meeting. At the beginning of the second sprint, we finally got to meet our client (virtually) for the first time!
Kick-off session ✏️
On February 4th, we held our kick-off meeting with the client representatives from Optum, and overally it was a huge success!
We planned the kick-off session with a series of activities, such as Envisioning Success and Stakeholder Mapping, to engage in meaningful conversations with our clients, align our priorities and goals, and get some of our burning questions answered.
One of my personal favorite parts about the kick-off was the “Postcard from the Future” activity, where the Optum and CMU teams shared out our visions on what the future experience could be like for physicians in 2032. It was so interesting to read about everyone’s postcard, which got our team more excited about what we can contribute.
It is safe to say that after the kick-off meeting, our team developed more clarity on the scope of our problem space. Moving forward, we will mostly focus on primary care physicians in a clinical outpatient setting.
Scrappy research: Get out there and talk to people, anyone 💬
While our team gets busy planning and coordinating research activities, we also wanted to warm ourselves up by conducting a series of “scrappy research”.
Scrappy research is meant to be fast and less structured research activities that help us quickly get inside the problem space. Besides engaging in conversations with our personal contacts who work in the healthcare space, we also wanted to throw ourselves out there and do some intercept interviews in the wild.
And voila! There we were, standing in front of a local hospital, intercepting people wearing scrubs, and asking about their daily work experiences and frustrations. Going up to a stranger on the street and striking a conversation was a bit intimidating at first, but it turned out to be a fun learning experience.
Literature review 📚
Aligning goals and priorities with our client definitely fostered a clearer direction for our subsequent research efforts, but we also identified some assumptions that require more investigation and validation. With those in mind, we framed our research into the following five main themes:
- Human Factors Considerations
- Healthcare UI and Technology Trends
- Causes of Physician Burnout
- Characteristics of Millennial Physicians
- Physician Workflow
Each team member took the lead in one of the five areas to review 6–10 pieces of literature, with the goal of absorbing as much information as we could in each sub-field. The team is now working hard to synthesize what we learned, and we are eager to present some of the key findings to the Optum team during our client meeting this week!
What’s next?
As the second sprint comes to an end, we will soon be diving into interviews with Optum physicians as well as other experts in the healthcare field. Besides that, we are also planning to do some contextual inquiries in which we hope to shadow physicians and observe their workflow in their most natural work settings. After all, context always matters, and nothing can beat the learnings that come from the most authentic work environment.
Oh, in case you missed our logo at the top, we have officially named ourselves “Team Optumist”, because we are very optimistic about the future of healthcare technologies and physician experiences. :)
Looking forward to more learnings that will unfold in the next sprint!
