MEDCON 2018
BlackHägen’s contextual inquiry in a simulated operating room
4. The case for generative research might be strongest in medical product design. One speaker said, “We’re all in the alignment business,” meaning our work is to get stakeholders, patients and engineers aligned in how to design medical products that deliver safe and effective therapy while meeting all stakeholder needs. The good news is that this is being initiated more and more by business leaders who are insisting on leading innovation with research because they recognize that patient safety and patient care are directly tied to business value. 5. There are fluffy bunnies. Bob Schwartz, FIDSA, from GE Healthcare said it well when he framed the two poles in design as “fluffy bunnies versus show me the money.” The “bunnies” represent highly conceptual strategic design work that doesn’t stand a chance unless designers are willing to embrace the necessary business principles that will ensure their concepts reach patients and clinicians. Designers tend to be more motivated by generative qualitative research, but interest from business leadership will be limited until that research is validated by quantitative numbers. 6. Technology is being leveraged in super interesting ways in the name of generative and evaluative research. Dr. Teodor Grantcharov, a professor of surgery at the University of Toronto, told a rapt audience about the “patient safety black box he has deployed in an operating room at St.
40
IDSA.ORG
Michael’s Hospital in Toronto to track adverse surgical events and analyze potential causes” (www.stmichaelshospital.com/ media/detail.php?source=hospital_news/2017/0803). The black box records nearly everything in the operating room, including video of the surgical procedure, clinician conversations, room temperature and decibel levels. Dr. Grantcharov provided some intriguing insights about this high-risk environment. For example, an operating room door is likely to open every two minutes, and human failure accounts for 69 percent of adverse events. One data point that perhaps works against design researchers gaining more access to the operating room is that having eight people in the operating room is correlated with twice the likelihood of adverse events compared to four people. In another presentation, Charles Mauro, IDSA, of Mauro Usability Science shared how his research consultancy is leveraging haptic sensors and tracking to optimize human factors for medical devices. He demonstrated how wearable sensors track participant usage of injection devices, how eye tracking combined with EEG (electroencephalography) provides more accurate user feedback on IFUs (instructions for use), and how micro-facial expression technology (Affectiva) can be used to assess the emotional responses of subjects who are self-injecting medication. On a more basic level, he described how placing a simple 3D tracker inside medical packaging can be an effective indicator of how frustrated people get while trying to open it.